Customer Reviews

I, Quantrill

5 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the first of Max McCoy's books I've read, but it won't be the last. He has created a story starring Quantrill, giving the reader a human look at this hated/loved figure. I'm not well-versed in the western genre, but I know a good story and this definitely qualifies. Once I started reading I didn't want to stop.

Granted, I, Quantrill is fiction, and Max McCoy creates a believable Quantrill whose first-person narration reveals the strengths and weaknesses of a man both revered and hated. First-person narration is always unreliable, which makes McCoy's novel all the more interesting to those who have read about the historical man. For the most part, the story is well-crafted, although I would have preferred a shorter denouement. The woman in black is a nice touch. Max McCoy drew me into Quantrill's world and his view of himself. I found the novel to be a page-turner.

I thoroughly enjoyed everything about this excellent novel.It is the first thing I've read by Max McCoy;and found him to be a terrific writer;and am looking forward to reading more from him.Although I've read some Civil War things,watched a lot of movies and historical documentries about the War,and am continually coming across things that happened during the War in reading Westerns and history;I am certainly a rank novice when it comes to details of the War;and totally unable to separate truth from fiction and legend.
That being said,I found this an engrossing read of one of the famous personalities associated with the War.The author draws you into the personality of Quantrill,revealing his inner thoughts and without doubt,makes you understand what went on with these events ,and what Quantrill,himself,felt about things.The author has an uncanny ability to develop the characters involved so that the reader really feels that they actually know and understand them,lifting them out of being just historical names,but real people.
As I said,I am not knowledgeable to any extent on Civil War history.I was really taken by Hyacinth (Blue) Fugate.I did not even know if Quantrill was ever married.A check of Wikipedia shows that he married Sara Catherine King in Blue Spring,Missouri and that she was only 14 at the time;and that she was 17 when Quantrill died.She is not mentioned in the novel.However Quantrill meets up with Blue Fulgate in Troublesome Creek,Kentucky ,shortly before he dies.Again a check on the net shows that there was a family of blue people by that name in Kentuckey at that time,and there were many descendents who were blue skinned.At the time of Quantrill's death,June 6,1865,after being shot and critically wounded on May 10,1865,he was only 27 years old.The picture on the book's cover is the same as shown for him on Wikipedia,thus it is a true likeness.
I suppose there is a lot to sort out between Quantrill's destruction of Lawrence Kansas,and his journey back to Kentucky,and his death;there is no doubt about this being a great novel about a greater than life, historical person.

The author brings you one of the most notorious figures in the War of Secession, a/k/a the "Civil War", William Clarke Quantrill. I remember seeing the great actor Walter Pidgeon portray Quantrill in a movie in my long ago youth. For most who know anything about that unhappy period in our nation's history, Quantrill is one of those names which conjure up visions of murderous night riders carrying out burnings and killing of innocent men, women and children before disappearing with the dawn to eventually die in a hail of Union bullets. Certainly, Quantrill spilled his share of blood. He often fought under the "black flag" (no prisoners taken) and, indeed, a flag attributed to him was black with a white capital letter Q in the upper left corner.

But Quantrill and those who rode with him were not unrelieved villains, men without hearts or a just cause. They were, in fact, results rather than causes of a period of violence and hatred that led to the nickname for one of the states involved, "Bloody Kansas". Quantrill actually began his wartime career - and the war in the border states started before Sumter and continued after Appomattox - on the other side of the issue before determining that he preferred the bushwhackers of the South to the jayhawkers of the North. Nor was Quantrill an uneducated ruffian but a learned and cultured man. He was very young, dying at twenty-seven. His worth was such that a Confederate officer advised him to abandon "guerrilla warfare" and join the Confederate army where he would be appreciated and protected with a commission in that service. Quantrill chose not to follow that sound advice and paid the ultimate price for his shortsightedness.

The author is intelligent enough not to follow his subject for the entire war. Incidents prior to the period in which the narrative picks up are covered with artful "flashbacks". He makes of his subject neither a hero nor a villain, but a man caught up in the circumstances of his time. He does something that frankly, I've never seen done before - and it is all the more powerful for it being so seldom referenced in fact or fiction - he presents intimate (VERY intimate) details of Quantrill's last days in a prison hospital after having his spinal cord injured by a bullet in the back. We are treated (to use an odd word) to the realities of life among men who are often unable to provide the most intimate care necessary for simple hygiene. I was both appalled and delighted to note that the author did not shrink from situations that certainly happened (they still happen today in similar circumstances) when a man may find himself lying in his own excrement for want of humane care. I will say that this particular ending to what had been "a tale of high adventure" made the story and the characters more real than would have been the case had Quantrill's last sad days been covered with a few sanitized phrases.

I highly recommend this book. It is rather unique because the author has given us a man and not a legend for good or ill. The reader will feel sympathy for a young man who, in another time and place, might have had a happy and productive life. Certainly William Quantrill is one more example of the waste of war and Mr. McCoy has presented this case quite admirably.

This is a fictionalized view of Quantrill, not a biography. The guy (Quantrill) can do no wrong and has women throwing themselves at him all the time. Ironically, it is the Federals pursuing Quantrill who are viewed as blood-thirsty villans, while Quantrill and his men (with one exception) are viewed as kind-hearted humanitarians. It is Quantrill who garners sympathy, not the women and children whose husbands and fathers he murdered. I read the entire book thinking it would become more realistic, and eventually threw it away.