Anything for Billy was published by Simon & Schuster in 1988, three years after Lonesome Dove. Benjamin Sippy is a dime novelist — a writer of cheap Western adventure stories — from Philadelphia. He has never been west of Trenton, but his books sell well to an Eastern readership hungry for tales of gunfighters, cattle rustlers, and frontier justice. Sick of his marriage and his comfortable, pointless life, Sippy heads west and falls in with Billy Bone, McMurtry’s version of Billy the Kid.
McMurtry’s Billy is not the charismatic rebel of legend. He is a small, dirty, semi-literate teenager who kills people because he has a bad temper and a quick hand. He is not brave — he usually shoots from ambush or when his victims are unarmed. He is not romantic — his relationships with women are crude and transactional. He is not clever — his survival depends more on luck and on the incompetence of his pursuers than on any skill. Sippy, who has spent his career inventing glamorous Western heroes, is simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the reality.
The novel is a sustained meditation on the gap between myth and reality in the American West — a subject McMurtry had been exploring since Horseman, Pass By but never addressed this directly. Sippy’s dime novels create the myth; Billy’s actual life demolishes it. But the myth, McMurtry suggests, is more powerful than the reality. Billy becomes famous not because of what he actually did but because of what writers like Sippy said he did. The West is not a place; it is a story.
Collecting Anything for Billy
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$25
- Signed: $40–$100