Law and Order, Ltd. : The Rousing Life of Elfego Baca of New Mexico

The year is 1928. Forty-four Octobers have come and gone since Elfego Baca earned top ranking as a gunfighter. Few now remember that on a fall day in 1884, in the village of Frisco, New Mexico, Baca ducked some 4,000 bullets fired by eighty cowboys aiming to kill him. Fewer still recall that the reason for the shoot-out was Baca's obsession with rescuing Mexican settlers from abuse by Texans in days before 'civil rights' became a catch phrase. The reputation of the Hero-now turned-lawman-lawyer-politician is sorely in need of repair, for despite his boasts of possessing one of the best law practices in the state, things have not gone well for Baca. Elfego has been declared a bankrupt; he's been humiliated by an untidy divorce; and neither political party in the state seems to want to run him as a candidate for much of anything. So, what's a man of action to do?

What Elfego does is to make a pre-emptive strike to repair that tattered reputation. He finds a biographer to tell his story just like he wants it told, including his meetings with Billy the Kid and the opera star, Mary Garden. He finally settles on Kyle Samuel Crichton, but only after William A. Keleher, the respected journalist-lawyer, has said, 'No.' Keleher introduces Baca to Crichton, who has few writing credentials though he would later author popular books and a successful Broadway play. Crichton has escaped from the smoke stacks and slag heaps of the Pennsylvania mining country to the pure air of Albuquerque, not to repair the reputation of those like Elfego who have fallen from grace, but to repair his own health. While Elfego is as short as Napoleon, Crichton is taller than Gary Cooper. While Elfego is rotund, Crichton is thin and muscular. While Elfego is bold, Crichton is cautious. But Crichton, who later wrote a biography of the Metropolitan Opera star Risë Stevens (Subway to the Met), brings a wild sense of humor that was to be reflected in all his books. And, while Baca is long on yarns that boost his heroism, Crichton insists on balance. The narrative of the book the pair produced remains open to question: How much of it is fact, how much is flights of fancy? Whichever it is, it's a whale of a story about a life lived to a fullness rarely experienced.

Kyle Crichton was born in 1896 in Peale, a town in Pennsylvania's coal-mining country. He worked as a coal miner, a turret-lathe operator in a machine shop, and an open-hearth puddler in the Allegheny steel mills. He attended Bethlehem's Lehigh University, was admitted to membership in Phi Delta Theta, and graduated in 1917. Upon becoming afflicted with tuberculosis in the 1920s, Crichton went to New Mexico, where he entered Albuquerque's Methodist Sanatorium. After recovering, he was active in politics, for a time serving as manager of the Albuquerque Civic Council. He turned to writing in 1922, and his first book, "Law and Order, Ltd.," a biography of the quirky and colorful lawyer and former outlaw Elfego Baca, was published in 1928.He moved to New York City in 1929 and was hired by Scribner's as a book editor, working under the legendary Maxwell Perkins. He was a member of the New York literary community for the next thirty years. He wrote articles for the publications Daily Worker and New Masses espousing a left-wing political point of view under the pen name Robert Forsythe. He also wrote interviews and articles under his own name for Collier's Weekly, where he was associate editor. His next two books, "Redder Than the Rose" (1936) and "Reading from Left to Right" (1938) collected essays and articles critical of everything from capitalism and William Randolph Hearst to Broadway and H.L. Mencken. His other books include the novels "Proud People" and "The History of the Adventures of George Whigham and his Friend Mr. Clancey Hobson"; the biography of the soprano Risë Stevens "Subway to the Met," the biography of Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle "My Philadelphia Father," which was successfully adapted for the Broadway stage and later a Disney musical film as The Happiest Millionaire; a biography of the Marx Brothers; and "Total Recoil," an account of personalities he met over a forty-year period. He died in 1960 in New York City.