Elmer McCurdy: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw
by Mark Svenvold
Fourth Estate £16.99, pp261

If only he had been properly buried, it is unlikely that anyone would remember Elmer McCurdy. A spectacularly duff outlaw during the Wild West's twilight years, McCurdy was shot by a sheriff's posse in 1911. His remains, embalmed in arsenic, remained at the funeral parlour until an audacious huckster, claiming to be Elmer's brother, made off with the body and shoved it into a touring carnival.

The late McCurdy, mummified and looking none too pleased about it, bounced down almost every rung of low-rent gaudy entertainment during ensuing decades. In life, a drifter, in death, he worked harder than ever, as successive owners made him a grisly exhibit in a waxworks museum, a prop for sexploitation movies (his scenes were cut); they even had him painted Day-Glo red and dangling from the ceiling of a ghost train at the Laff-in-the-Dark funhouse. Even when finally laid to rest in Guthrie, Oklahoma, an ailing town looking for heritage tourism, a local hotel made his grave the focus of raucous murder mystery weekends.

Mark Svenvold's shuffle through popular culture chronicles McCurdy's attempt at larceny. In its heyday, Svenvold writes: 'Train robbery was the great leveller: the newest, fastest and easiest way... for the little guy with little inclination for honest work to stick it to the lords of capitalism'.

By the time McCurdy tried his luck, that golden age was past. On one heist, he robbed the wrong train and netted $46 ('One of the smallest in the history of rain robbery,' a laconic press report noted). After blowing everything but the safe to smithereens on another job, his final blast fused all the silver coins to the safe walls. Fond of the bottle and shaky on theft theory, McCurdy was always heading for calamity.

Svenvold insists that the mythic West had in any case slid into history. Lawless frontier towns were now genteel communities with schoolhouses and fancy goods. McCurdy lost his job as a plumber in Kansas because it was rumoured he had killed a man in a bar-room brawl. There was no room for reprobates in what Svenvold dubs the 'mild West'. McCurdy turned to crime not through heroism but desperation. A newspaper report of one escapade was headlined 'The Days of the Wild West Resurrected,' and McCurdy's posthumous career can be seen as an attempt to boot up the glamorous history and make it pay.

McCurdy's withering body touches base with all forms of celebrity. During the narrative, the Wright brothers publicise their flights and Henry Ford turns out the Model-T; waxworks commemorate Lee Harvey Oswald. Even the coroner overseeing McCurdy's recovered cadaver had previously scalpelled into Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate and Janis Joplin. Svenvold has a sharp eye for the amoral nature of American celebrity - McCurdy's corpse fetches up in a waxwork museum where figures of the US Presidents line up on one side and notorious criminals on the other.

Although Svenvold portrays McCurdy's as an exemplary American life, an Everyman who becomes an anthology of American myth, the real heart of his book is the stirring litany of promise that tugs you into the freakshow. The author prefers to present himself as an innocent befuddled by practised entertainment sharks, but he talks up a mean bally himself. Carnivals are 'blinking, winking' or 'flashy, trashy'; McCurdy's grave is 'encircled' by mourners - it's a hard-working linguistic charade to pad out a meagre story, and a weighty thesis to rest on McCurdy's spare remains.