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Glynda, Ron Hansen, the author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a 1983 novel based on the assassination of American Wild West bandit Jesse James at the hands of Robert Ford.
Since it was a novel, based on historical events,Ron responded to questions, which reveal his approach to writing:
‘Often readers of such a novel ask me, “How much of this is true?” It’s a reasonable question, since frequent malpractice has made the historical novel a suspect genre. My rules are fairly simple: honesty and fidelity throughout, meaning no hard facts, however inconvenient, may be dismissed and no crucial scenes, however wished for, may be turned to ends that may be more pleasing to a contemporary audience. In other words, I do not budge from the truth as I know it and I firmly root the novel in the 19th century in spite of 20th-century perceptions of what can and should be done or said. I relied primarily on period newspaper accounts, secondarily on histories, and not at all on the recollections of the descendants of family and eyewitnesses since those “memories” are the most tinged by flattering interpretation.
I have been asked why there is no exit wound in the front of his head if Jesse was shot by a revolver just behind his ear. My answer simply is that there was no exit wound and the bullet was extracted from inside his skull—whether that is a fault of the gunpowder in the cartridge is unknown to me, and did not particularly trouble the journalists at the time.
I have been asked about the claim that Charles Bigelow, rather than Jesse James, was killed on April 3, 1882, and whether J. Frank Dalton, who claimed to be Jesse and thus was 103 years old when he died, was the real thing. Looking at the last item first, J. Frank Dalton was not the man’s real name but one taken up in middle age on his first inclination to pretend to be Bob Dalton’s older brother Franklin, and J. Frank had almost no resemblance to photographs of Jesse; he also claimed an impossible relationship with Howard Hughes, and he seems to have been one of the unknown heroes of World War I. A fraud, in other words, but a fascinating one.
Recent medical examinations have proved the DNA of the remains in the Kearney , Missouri , grave of Jesse Woodson James in fact match the DNA in samples of other items known to have belonged to him. Cranks who still believe otherwise are not worth the argument. But even before such tests were available, the Charles Bigelow conspiracy theory made no sense. Were the funeral of Jesse James a fake, it would mean Zee James and Jesse’s mother, Zerelda, were the finest actresses of the century, and Jesse, the famously loyal family man, was content to witness his wife and children living in abject poverty until Zee’s premature death. Also, the corpse photographed and forensically examined in St. Joseph , Missouri , in 1882 contained every injury, physical characteristic, and dental repair of the famous outlaw.’
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