• Nonfiction. By Michael Wallis. Norton & Co., $25.95.Grade: C

Book in a nutshell: You know you're in for some serious expectation management when the first line in Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride admits that "few American lives have more successfully resisted research than (the life of) Billy the Kid." As if that weren't clear enough, you'll read two pages later that "Everything about this young man is open to question including the date of his birth," and that "almost every facet of his life is completely undocumented."

What we think we know is this: The person who came to be known as Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty sometime in the fall of 1859. He later used the name Henry Antrim, and by 1876 was known by the nickname Kid Antrim.

A year later, he was calling himself William Bonney. He spent his few adult years in Lincoln County, N.M., an area so violent that it had its own war named after it. He was slight, athletic and bilingual. He had a reputation for joy and frivolity, even though he unfrivolously killed at least four men before he himself was killed in 1881.

That means that author Wallis had little to work with, and it shows. While covering the scant information that is known about Billy the Kid, Wallis wanders down historical side streets that have little, if anything, to do with his main subject. Wallis tries to connect these diversions to Billy's life, but the connections are flimsy. One example: Several pages about P.T. Barnum end with the idea that the dime novels Barnum promoted "may have caught the eye" of Billy's mother and persuaded her to move West.

Best tidbit: "(Sheriff) Whitehall thought the young man's eyes may have danced but that only meant they were shifty and indicated Henry had larceny in his heart. 'There was one peculiar facial characteristic that to an experienced man hunter would have marked him immediately as a bad man, and that was his dancing eyes.'"

Pros: Wallis seems to know his subject inside out.

Cons: There's not a lot to know about this subject.

Final word: Wallis compensated for knowing too little by writing too much.