Behind the legend that you know is the boy you never met.
“Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County” is the highly-anticipated debut novel of Ryan C. Coleman.
Ryan began his career in television, writing episodes of the smash hit The Walking Dead and the A&E series Damien. But ever since he first learned of one fateful decision Billy the Kid made when he was 15 that changed the course of his life – and history – forever, Ryan knew he had to tell this story.
Part western, part organized crime, “Billy the Kid: The War for Lincoln County” traces the gunslinger’s life from the age of 14, when his mother passes away leaving him orphaned, through the cold-blooded mercantile war that extended from the dusty streets of New Mexico all the way to the White House, ending in the five-day battle of Lincoln. In the middle of it all was Billy the Kid, a young man looking for anything to call home, anyone to call family, and who would become the most notorious outlaw in the world.
Ryan C. Coleman was born in Chicago, grew up in Dallas, and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. He has previously written for television, including the smash hit The Walking Dead, and currently lives in Los Angeles. “Billy the Kid“ is his first novel.
Check out our interview with Ryan:
Congratulations on your debut novel! How does it feel that your first novel is done and out there for the public?
Ryan: It’s a relief. This is something I’ve been thinking about, and a project I’ve been marinating on for 20 years, and so to finally sit down and write it, and then now have it out feels good. But also, you know, the process is over, which can be a little daunting and exhausting, and so I’m very happy.
20 years, that is a very long time. Is that unusual, or is that kind of the norm for a project like this?
Ryan: No, I would imagine that’s unusual. And it wasn’t like I sat down 20 years ago, you know? It wasn’t like chapter 1, then 20 years later, I finished it. I worked in television and film, that’s how I got my start, and so I’d always wanted to do a project about Billy the Kid because I never felt like there was, like an accurate depiction of him and so I wrote a pilot that would have been like a limited series. I was just consuming everything I could about Billy the Kid, every documentary, every nonfiction book and so it’s just this idea that’s been percolating around in my head for about 20 years.
Since you are a TV writer, which looking at your bio writer for “The Walking Dead,” one of my favorite shows, I am very excited to talk to you–
Ryan: Oh, great, great. I don’t know how familiar you are with it, but in season three, there’s an episode where Rick and the governor are gonna have a face to face, sit down, and they meet in this barn. It’s sort of this negotiation before they decide to go to war. That was my episode.
I haven’t seen it in a while, but the governor’s storyline is my absolute favorite. As a TV writer, was it your natural instinct to try to make Billy the Kid catered to TV?
Ryan: I think, having come from film and TV, I sort of think in the three act structure. So that was just sort of how I mapped it out. And, you know, I work with Shane Salerno with this company called The Story Factory, and we deal with a lot of authors, you know, Don Winslow, Adrian McKinty, the filmmaker Michael Mann, and the whole experience working with all these people has also really ingrained that in my head. We want sort of like a three act structure that hopefully is a page turner, and that, if things are going well, you know, film and TV executives can just picture in their head how it could be adapted.
Okay, so then, how did it go from trying to make this for TV or film into a novel?
Ryan: I was talking to Shane Salerno, who’s an excellent screenwriter in his own right. He wrote Armageddon, he wrote the Avatar movies that are out. Now he’s one of those writers, but on the side, he’s got this business where he represents novelists like the ones I mentioned, and I’ve been talking to him about doing this limited series. And the author Don Winslow was also a huge Billy the Kid fan. So Don and I started talking about it, and then it was Shane’s idea. Shane said, ‘what if we do it as a novel? And then that would give us some options of what we can do down the road.’ I had never written a novel before, and he said, ‘it’s going to be fine. It’s no big deal,’ and it is a big deal, and it’s fine. It’s really, really hard, but I slogged my way through it. Here we are.
So when you say it is a big deal and it’s not fine, what does that actually mean?
Ryan: I mean it’s way longer than anything I have ever written in my entire life, right? Like, even when you’re writing a feature film, screenplay, you know, it’s 120 pages with a ton of white space on every page. And so this was just, you know, it’s daunting. And I was writing it during the pandemic, and as I was writing it, my now wife– we were engaged and were going to get married in August of 2020, and so there was a lot going on. And in the meanwhile, you know, in the morning, I’m sitting down, I was looking at this blank page, and I’m like, how am I going to fill up 400 pages? I’ve never done this before. And then I sat down to write, and it turns out I write long. So, the original inclination was to do the whole story of Billy the Kid, from the time he was 14 until he died at 21, and I got to page like 480 and I was only up to the part where the book actually is. And so I didn’t even write about the last three years of Billy the Kid’s life, where all this other really interesting stuff happens. So it turns out I write long.
Well, I guess in this case, that’s a good thing.
Ryan: Yes. It helps. Better to cut down than have to spell out.
So, with this novel, I’m assuming the war of Lincoln County is part of it, but what’s a brief synopsis of what this novel is about?
Ryan: It’s a story of this young man, Billy, the Kid, who at the age of 14, his mother passes away. His stepfather doesn’t really want anything to do with him or his brother, so his stepfather leaves New Mexico, goes off to Arizona to mine silver, essentially leaving Billy orphaned. Billy kind of falls in with a bad crowd, but nothing outside the norm of any, you know, mischievous 14-15 year old but one of the guys that he runs around with stole some blankets and some guns from a local laundry. And he says, ‘Hey, Billy, will you hide these?’ Billy says, ‘Okay, we’ll hide them at the bottom of the steamer trunk.’ The woman whose house he’s staying in finds them, tells the sheriff. The sheriff comes over and arrests Billy. Billy’s freaked out, he’s taken to the jail for the night. He’s in jail, and he’s sort of left alone to roam around the jail because he’s just a kid, and he looks up and he sees the chimney, and he’s like, ‘I’m facing a hard time. I’ve got a small frame. I think I can do it.’ He sneaks up out the chimney, under the roof, and he goes on the run. And what he didn’t know is that the sheriff was just trying to scare him. The sheriff showed up in the morning to release him, and Billy the Kid was gone. This pivotal moment changed his life and really the history of the Old West, forever. From then on, he was essentially an outlaw, and he’s just bouncing around looking for a place to call home, and he’s looking for family because he has none, and he is just a kid. And, you know, all these depictions and films and movies show him as this sort of cackling psychopath as bullets are rizzing by his head. And I just, I just try to put myself in the mindset of what is a 15 year old kid, completely out on his own in the 1870s Old West– which, you know, these aren’t even states, these are still territories– and he’s left to his own devices. He’s just glomming on trying to find some sort of community. And he eventually finds somebody that he thinks is going to be a mentor, and then that person is murdered in front of him, and that just sort of flips the switch in him. And so there’s the context of Billy’s life, and then also the surrounding Lincoln County War, which, to me, was just an earlier version of organized crime you’d see in the early 1900s, except instead of Italians, it was the Irish and English. And so it’s really just how this setting framed Billy the Kid’s life and turned him into a legend.
That’s so interesting. I’ve always known Billy the Kid was a thing, but I was more of a Dalton Gang person. So this is very interesting, because, yeah, like, I don’t picture him as like a 15-16 year old boy doing this–
Ryan: No, you picture a 25 year old Paul Newman, a 25 year old Kris Kristopherson, a 25 year old Emilio Estes from the movies, but yeah. But the Dalton Gang, you know, that’s also well covered territory, but not as well covered. So maybe you should write a book about the Dalton Gang.
That would be quite an investment, as you would know. (laughs)
Ryan: It’s not like you have a full time job or anything, right? Plenty of free time.
So in the 20 years of thinking about this, and with all the research that you had to put into it, how much of this is truth versus historical fiction?
Ryan: I mean, obviously I don’t know what the exact conversations taking place between the people are, but as far as the characters and events, I would say 90% truth. I would invent, you know, a character here or there, or a scene or a moment here or there, to use as sort of like connective tissue. For instance, Billy the Kid fell in with this gang called the Boys, and they were this really bad gang. They were essentially working as the muscle for the Santa Fe ring, which was sort of the corrupt overseers of all of New Mexico. One of the guys in the gang thought that his girlfriend had the hots for Billy, and so he kept threatening Billy. He wanted to kill Billy. And so Billy sees the writing on the wall, and he escapes. He flees, and he ends up hooking up with the rival store that’s trying to, like, compete against the bad guys’ side. And I knew eventually that in real life, Billy the Kid and the Regulators had killed this guy, Buck Morton, who was part of the original bad gang, the Boys, but I didn’t know which member of the Boys actually thought that his girlfriend had the hots for Billy, so I just shifted and like, ‘Okay, well, we’ll say Buck Morton is the one that thinks his girlfriend has the hots for Billy.’ And it sort of lays the groundwork for later in the story, when, in real life, Billy and the Regulators killed Buck Morton. So it’s that sort of thing, where it’s just slightly massaging things and using, you know, a few fictional characters and events here and there to make it all tie together.
Was there anything throughout this process that really surprised you about learning who Billy the Kid was, other than how young he was?
Ryan: I think that it was the early part of his life before his mentor, John Constable, was killed. I was really trying to put myself in his head, and as I was doing so, just thinking about this, like 15 year old kid, just, you know, he’s 15, possibly 16, at this point, and just like how daunting and rough life must have been to be out on your own at that time, you’ve got no job, you know, you’re popping around trying to get work here and there. You’d work for a day on a ranch, and they’d say, ‘Thank you, here’s $1, but you’re too small and too weak to do this sort of thing.’ It’s almost surprising, the fact that he made it to 21 years old, let alone 18 or whatever. So, yeah, I hadn’t really thought about that aspect of it, because I’d spent so much time watching these movies and documentaries and stuff, and nobody was really touching on the real world implications of being that age, at that time. I don’t know, when I was 15 or 16, I would have been dead within a month.
Is there any particular message or any sort of like takeaway that you want people to take away from reading this?
Ryan: You know, for me, one of the more surprising and interesting parts about it is the organized crime aspect, and that it was being run like the entire territory was just being run as one giant grift. And I just found it so fascinating to take you know these mafia stories that we think of like Godfather, but placing it in the Old West. The parallels are really striking.
So, you say that you have all of this information on Billy the Kid, and it sounds like you have multiple novels worth, are you planning any sort of sequel, prequel, or maybe a TV show or film?
Ryan: There’s definitely room for a second book that could cover, you know, from the time he was 18 until he died at 21 because there’s just as much fascinating information happening there. But I think for my next project, I’m probably going to go straight fiction. I’m toying around with three or four ideas, some of them are a little more high concept in the crime thriller space. I think I need a little bit of a break from historical fiction. But as far as film and TV, yeah, I would love to. I would love to explore that option. And you know, Shane (Salerno) and I are sitting down and talking about it, so we will see what happens.
Well, my fingers are crossed for you on that.
Ryan: Thank you so much
With your next project being more of a crime thriller, are you going to stick with a Western vibe, or are you going to branch out from that as well?
Ryan: You know what? I have this idea, which is also another feature I’ve written for. It’s sort of a Western detective set in Chicago, but I think I might need to go to something that’s a little more commercial next. I’m not sure what the appetite is for a Western detective story, so, you know, I’ll have to see. I’m sort of just sketching out these four or five ideas I’ve gotten and I’m just gonna kind of really go with whichever one pulls me the hardest. But I do have a Western detective story in my back pocket, if that’s the one that is calling to me.
Well, I would definitely read it. With TV and film having its own Western Renaissance, I’ve grown to appreciate the genre so much. So, you have at least one person that would read it.
Ryan: That would be great. I mean, that’ll be my pitch to the publisher. Look, we got one in the bag. Yeah, we’re good to go here. (laughs) And I’m sure my family will buy one too. So you know, we’ll have at least two. What is it about westerns that you are really appreciating?
Honestly, it’s the grit of the characters and just that they don’t need all of the fancy technology and things helping them get through their obstacles. They kind of rely on themselves, their community and their own fortitude.
Ryan: Yeah, no, I agree. You know, it’s a different time, and, you know, obviously due to the state of technology in modern society, these types of individuals are just gone forever, I believe.
Yeah, but we can always bring them back with art.
Ryan: Indeed. Indeed. Are there specific shows or movies you’re enjoying?
I just watched Hold Your Breath with Sarah Paulson and like, it’s more of a horror thriller, but it’s set in Oklahoma in the 1930s.
Ryan: I have not seen that. I’m gonna have to check that out. That sounds right up my alley.
It’s on Hulu, 10 out of 10.
Ryan: Perfect! A little dust bowl, Depression era story and I love Sarah Paulson, so yeah, this is hitting all my sweet spots.
I highly recommend it. So where can we keep like, follow you and keep up with you and your work?
Ryan: I’m on Twitter a little bit. I’m not really into talking about politics or anything, which is sort of overtaken Twitter. I try to just stick to, you know, books and happy, positive things. So I’m on Twitter a little bit, but I don’t have, like, a huge social media presence.
Yeah, I noticed that you didn’t have a website.
Ryan: I bought a domain name, I think, like six months ago. It’s like Ryan Coleman author or something, but I haven’t set it up. And, you know, if I sit down to write another book, I’ll develop a website too, but for now, nope, it’s just me, like it’s back in the 1800s.
Very fitting. All right, before I let you go, is there anything else you’d like to add about “Billy the Kid: The war for Lincoln County”?
Ryan: No, I would really just hope that people pick it up and give it a chance, and I think they’ll find a different side to Billy the Kid than the one they know or has been depicted on screen. I think it’s just a different side of him, and I think it’s a little more grounded in reality. And hopefully it puts people in his shoes, in a way that, you know, a big Hollywood blockbuster really can’t.
