Strother Purcell had attained notoriety in his own time, but his fame - or infamy - had largely died with him. A gunman whose prowess echoed through the American frontier and whose blood-feud with his own half-brother was nearly biblical in proportion, little remains of the saga of one of America's most notorious gunslingers. That is, until a long-lost foundational epic, tucked between the p. of a misfiled library book, is discovered nearly a century later: The Purcelliad. What unfolds is an archetypal saga of obsession, treachery, lost love, murder and revenge-and that's just the academic research -told in Ian Weir's trademark funny, fast, wickedly intelligent style. A deadpan revisionist Western and a tale of academic skullduggery, The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is a novel about the power of the past... and the lengths we'll go to in order to invent it.