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Show The Daltons are no cardboard cowboys in Hansen's roughshod Western tale Book Review byNANCHALAT Record staff writer Desperadoes: A Novel About the Dalton Gang by Ron Hansen, Ballantine Books, New York, 1979, paperback, 273 pp., $3.50. Let me say, right off the bat, I am not usually a fan of shoot 'em up, bang, bang, you're dead, Western novels. In my experience, they are just as predictable and boring as their cowboy counterparts on TV. The bad guys always deserves what he gets and in the end falls over dead like a cardboard sign. But Desperadoes: A Novel About the Dalton Gang is different. When the "bad" guys fall over in Desperadoes, they stuff their hats into their armpits to stop the bleeding and keep shooting. They smell the hot lead whiz by their faces and return wp shots, Sor, every on,o fired at them. They jump freight Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was released in 1982. It is also a fictional recreation based on historic fact and embellished with Hansen's eye for realistic detail. Hansen was in Park City recently for the Writer's at Work conference and he revealed a few of his trade secrets for digging up relevant data for his novels. He told a group of aspiring fiction writers he read all the newspapers of the day in Coffeyville, Ok., making careful note of the languge used, the price of eggs and references to the fashions of the day. He said he visited the Dalton museum and even went as far as to measure the length of the belt worn by Bob Dalton on the day he died. As a result, you don't just read Desperadoes, you feel it, taste it and wipe it off your brow. And after all that's what makes reading fun, ' right? '" ' "' " trains, shoot the locks off bank safes and between jobs they carry on their respective romances with the girl next door. Sure, it sounds like the same old story, but as Ron Hansen tells it, you could swear you tasted the gunsmoke and saw Bob Dalton turn the pages of the Bible with a .22-caliber .22-caliber slug. The difference in Desperadoes is detail. The book paints as rich a picture of the American West at the turn of the century as any history textbook ever could. Admittedly, there are a few moments during which the reader , might wish the author had chosen to h spare some of the gruesome details, but Hansen is determined to leave nothing out from the sweat on the railroad engineer's shirtfront to the blood dripping out of a sheriff's coat sleeve. Hansen's version of the infamous Dalton's gang's rise to fame (and eventually, failure) offers readers an undistorted window on the past. And if the viewer choses to look through it, he will gain a memorable vision. It is one of those books that leaves you in a mysteriously nostalgic mood, as if you have just returned from a dusty train ride across Oklahoma in 1892. And if the ride was to your liking, Hansen has a second novel to quench your thirst for adventure and sarsaparilla. The Assassination of |