Elmer McCurdy
Subtitle: The Misadventures in Life and Afterlife of an American Outlaw
Publisher: Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group
Published: October 15, 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780465083480
First sentence: In December of 1976, Detective Daniel P. Sallmen of the Long Beach Police Department arrived at the office of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner holding a severed arm as if it were a baguette in a brown paper bag.
Description: "In life Elmer McCurdy was a plumber-cum-miner who jumped a train and drifted west across America on the back of an infectious, turn-of-the century optimism. He was a drunk too and, soon enough, a failed outlaw. In 1911, after a short spree of failed robberies, he held up the wrong train and rode away with a haul that was described by papers as "one of the smallest in the history of train robbery." It wasn't long before a sheriff and his posse caught up with him and shot him dead.".

"At this point McCurdy like us all, should have slipped into the earth and quietly from memory. But, in death, he accidentally found fame. From the Joseph Johnson Funeral Home, where the owner propped up McCurdy's preserved corpse and charged a nickel-a-look, to the sideshows of the Great Patterson Carnival where he was exhibited as a felled outlaw, McCurdy became big business.

In 1928 he was the star attraction in a carnival that accompanied an extraordinary transcontinental running race from Los Angeles to New York. In the thirties and forties, he was reinvented as a prop for a series of Hollywood exploitation films like Dwain (Reefer Madness) Esper's film Narcotic, before winding up painted day-glo orange and hanging by his neck in the Laff in the Dark ghost tunnel in Long Beach, California. It was here, in 1976, during the filming of an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, that Elmer was rescued from his strange journey, a forgotten corpse as light as tinderwood.

In his mouth the coroner discovered a green, corroded 1924 penny and a ticket stub that read "Louis Sonney's Museum of Crime".".

"Mark Svenvold tells the bizarre story of this quixotic American anti-hero and the journey through the twentieth century of his embalmed remains. A travel book, an exposition of the exotic corners of the entertainment industry, a meditation on death and its meanings and one of the most daring biographies of recent times, Elmer McCurdy brilliantly reveals America's deepest obsessions and how they have changed."--BOOK JACKET.
Table of contents: title: Re-entry; title: The West that wasn't; title: Help wanted; title: This fair but fated region; title: Of cadavers, their care and disposition; title: Exeunt; title: The bally; title: King of the dwarfs; title: Eternity, a list; title: For greater Guthrie; title: A dignified, if not entirely complete, burial; title: McCurdyana : swirl and vortex