Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw

Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw

From Elmer McCurdy:The body was listed as "the Decedent," in official coroner's parlance Dead Body Case #7614812. Word soon got out about the fun-house mummy, about whom so little was known that the autopsy took on the character of an archaeological dig. The body looked like something pulled out of a peat bog, or an ice cave high in the Andes. The brain was mummified and like a rock, as were all the other organs….Late in the autopsy came the biggest surprise of all. Removing the jaw, the coroner pulled from the back of the mouth a single green corroded copper penny, dated 1924, and several ticket stubs, one that read "Louis Sonney's Museum of Crime, 524 South Main Street, Los Angeles." After all the careful speculation and surmise, after the body had been completely dismantled, the biggest clue to its identity came straight from the corpse's mouth.Praise for Mark Svenvold:"Mark Svenvold writes with the top down, and his sleek late-model imagination in fifth gear. Honk if you love first books that can cruise or race with full-throated elegance. Here's one!" --J. D. McClatchy Poor Elmer McCurdy. After this comically inept, would-be train robber met a violent end in a shootout in 1911 Oklahoma, his corpse was embalmed with arsenic and began a decades-long second career as a sideshow attraction and Z-movie film prop. McCurdy's unique course through the American entertainment industry has attracted some interest in the past (Richard J. Basgall's The Career of Elmer McCurdy, Deceased). This grim but quirky tale of a man denied any dignity in life or death is considerably enlivened by poet Svenvold's picturesque and often humorous prose describing the history of the "Oklahoma Outlaw's" place in campy nostalgia. However, the thread of McCurdy's interesting journey is regularly lost among forays into such diverse topics as Douglas MacArthur's early army career and Osage Indian land rights. As a result, the reader soon feels as if the ticket were paid for but that there was nothing under the big top. For a similarly themed choice, consider Michael Paterniti's Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain. Recommended for libraries with large American studies collections. Elizabeth Morris, Otsego District P.L., MI Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Elmer McCurdy was a failed plumber turned failed criminal who was shot dead by a posse in 1911, after bungling a train robbery. In life, McCurdy was a classic two-bit loser, but after his death he was suddenly glorified as a hard-riding outlaw, and his embalmed body was turned into a sideshow attraction. The tale of McCurdy's corpse becomes a lively, digressive history of the underside of American popular entertainment in the twentieth century, from carnivals to exploitation films. Avoiding a ponderous cultural-studies tone, Svenvold offers sharp reflections on the cult of the outlaw and the charms of hucksterism, while staying keenly attuned to the wonderful strangeness of a culture that could transform a corpse into a celebrity. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker In December 1976, a Long Beach, California, detective arrived at the county medical examiner-coroner's office holding a severed arm that had been found, along with the rest of a mummified body, in a Long Beach amusement park fun-house ride during the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man . The corpse was that of Elmer McCurdy, who had been shot to death by a sheriff's posse in 1911. Svenvold chronicles the engaging and weird story of McCurdy's life and afterlife: in life, he was a most ineffectual train robber; in death, after being embalmed with arsenic, he traveled across the country in carnivals, and his corpse was later used in a couple of movies and displayed in a wax museum. Although it sounds like a bizarre work of fiction, Svenvold has done a first-rate job in documenting the story of a second-rate felon. George Cohen Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "Svenvold brings a poet's touch to the western mythopoeia.... Doing so, he presents a decidedly entertaining chunk of American pop culture." -- Kirkus Reviews, Sept. 15, 2002 Mark Svenvold has published two poetry collections, the more recent of which, Soul Data, won a Discovery/ The Nation award in poetry. His nonfiction has appeared in Harper's Bazaar and elsewhere. He currently lives in New York City. The body was listed as "the Decedent," in official coroner's parlance Dead Body Case #7614812. Word soon got out about the fun-house mummy, about whom so little was known that the autopsy took on the character of an archaeological dig. The body looked like something pulled out of a peat bog, or an ice cave high in the Andes. The brain was mummified and like a rock, as were all the other organs. Late in the autopsy came the biggest surprise of all. Removing the jaw, the coroner pulled from the back of the mouth a single green corroded copper penny, dated 1924, and several ticket