The Killings of Stanley Ketchel (26 page)
Read The Killings of Stanley Ketchel Online
Authors: James Carlos Blake
E
VELYN
N
ESBIT READ
Ketchel’s obituary in the
New York Times.
The report roused a vague memory of their evening together, but then she pushed it out of her mind and hurried off to that morning’s rehearsal. It was a stage comedy in which she portrayed the part of a beautiful girl torn between the true love of a poor but goodhearted farm boy and the lickerish attentions of a rich and randy old man. Over the following years she would have other small parts in other trivial theater works and then play minor roles in insignificant motion pictures. Then be an old and lonely woman for a long time before dying in a Hollywood nursing home in 1967.
J
ACK
L
ONDON HAD
just finished his day’s writing when he got word of Ketchel’s murder. He poured a full tumbler of rye and raised it to his eastward window. “Here’s to you, champ. Ashes, I say,
ashes!
” Then drained the entire glass in a single breath and coughed until his eyes were pouring tears and his lips were flecked with blood.
Even as he continued to travel about the world and write his daily quota of a thousand words, London’s health would degenerate apace and his luck run poorly. Within the next six years he would be plagued by a worsening insomnia, his wife would miscarry and thenceforth be unable to conceive, his beloved Wolf House would be razed by fire, he would have an appendectomy, he would contract dysentery and pleurisy, he would suffer from acute rheumatism and a severe and chronic nephritis. He would die in bed on the 22nd of November, 1916. The cause of death officially recorded as “uraemia following renal colic,” though in truth it might have been a stroke. Or, as some would have it, an ultimate failure of the heart.
J
ACK
J
OHNSON WAS
at Sheepshead Bay to race against Barney Oldfield when he was told the news in all its particulars. He did not respond immediately but looked off to seaward and the muscular white clouds rising off the horizon. Then showed his golden smile and said: “Dollar to a doughnut Mr. Stanley was starting to turn around to try and catch that bullet with his
teeth
…”
The following year, Johnson would marry Etta Duryea, who some months later would kill herself, by some accounts because of Johnson’s relentless philandering. He would own a popular café in Chicago. He would continue his public dalliances with white women and would be charged with violation of the Mann Act, a
federal law enacted to combat the white slave trade but also quite useful for the prosecution of bothersome persons who had broken no other law. At the time of his conviction in 1913, he would be married to Lucille Cameron, another white woman. While his case was under appeal he would flee the country and spend the next seven years in vagabond exile. He would wander through Europe and Latin America, live for a time in France, in Germany, Spain, Mexico. He would have great difficulty contracting for matches of much worth. In a span of almost five years after the Jeffries fight, he would be able to arrange but four defenses of his title. The last of them would be on April 5, 1915, in Havana, Cuba, against gigantic Jess Willard, who would batter him terribly and knock him out in the twenty-sixth round. Johnson would afterward claim the fight had been fixed, that he had taken a bribe to lose, that part of the deal was a government promise to drop the charges against him but he was double-crossed. To everyone who was there, however, it was obvious that Willard outfought him. In 1920 he would at last surrender to American authorities. He would be sentenced to a year in Leavenworth penitentiary and be released before the full term of the sentence. He would divorce Lucille and marry yet again. His last ring victory would be a third-round knockout when he was fifty-four years old. He would continue to box exhibition matches into the mid-1940s, the last of them at age sixty-seven.
On June 10, 1946, on a highway near Raleigh, North Carolina, he would be killed in a car crash. The cause of which, according to reports, was excessive speed.
For their kind and valuable assistance I am grateful to:
Robin Urban and Richard I. Gibson of the World Museum of Mining in Butte, Montana;
Sharol Higgins Neely of the Springfield—Greene County Library in Springfield, Missouri;
The Tucson—Pima County Library in Tucson, Arizona.
JAMES
Carlos
BLAKE
is the author of nine novels. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Southwest Book Award, Quarterly West Novella Prize, and Chautauqua South Book Award. He lives in Arizona.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
RAISE
FOR
THE KILLINGS OF STANLEY KETCHEL
“Unexpectedly elegant.
It’s
a masterful story,
charming for its roguish humor and slightly intimidating with its sharp narrative jabs…. Blake lends
poignant
immediacy to Ketchel’s life and persona, elevating his scrappy determination to near-mythic proportions without sacrificing the passionate human being at the center of the story…. This book would be hard for anyone to put down. Its playful sensuousness and stoic determination are
impossible to resist.”
—Rocky Mountain News
(A Favorite Book of the Year Selection)
“Expansive…. This
wonderfully written adventure
is part biography, part American picaresque novel, part crime story—episodic but
compelling, humorous, exciting,
and ultimately tragic.”
—Otto Penzler,
New York Sun
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel
presents us with an America at its most raw…
A daring book
where deft writing brings an era to full-blooded life….
Unforgettable.”
—Edmonton Journal
“James Carlos Blake is a master
at using history to tell a fictional tale, and he’s at it again with
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel.”
—Denver Post
“Packs a literary wallop…
and brims with violence, sex, and humor.”
—
Tucson Citizen
“The novel
resurrects Stanley Ketchel,
maybe as good a boxer pound for pound as any…. Blake captures Ketchel’s life…in prose so graceful readers may forget it packs the strength of a master….
Killings
moves with grace, hits with power.”
—Salt Lake City Tribune
(A Best Western Book of the Year Selection)
“Not only the story of a
remarkable
life but also a paean to the vitality—and brutality—of turn-of-the-century America. [
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel
]
resonates long after the last page is turned.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Terrific….
Reflects the country as it was then: flawed and brutal but dazzling with possibilities for anyone brave enough to reach for their dreams.”
—Arizona Republic
“Blake’s prose is as finely chiseled as sculpture….
[A] master of the taut and tough tale of amoral outsiders…. An earthy,
often funny
novel.”
—Montana Standard
“A fine work
of historical fiction…. James Carlos Blake’s
deftly crafted
new novel…paces the narrative adroitly…and it’s suitably delivered in his characteristically muscular style.”
—Tucson Weekly
“Ketchel fits the mold of a James Carlos Blake protagonist. He lives on the edge. He is fearless, violent, attractive to women, [and] imbued with the outlaw spirit…. Mr. Blake’s prose is deft and hard-boiled, [and] the book
packs a wallop.
”
—Dallas Morning News
“[[Ketchel] comes out slugging….
A vivid mix of history, myth and fantasy; its language consists of
hard-boiled
dialogue, period diction and florid description…. Readers who like their action raw and history bloody should find
plenty to cheer
in
The Killings of Stanley Ketchel.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“Hard-bitten, yet surprisingly
moving.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Action-packed…. A fascinating tale.”
Publishers Weekly
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE KILLINGS OF STANLEY KETCHEL
. Copyright © 2005 by James Carlos Blake. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition August 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196797-9
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