Conville & Walsh

Affectionate, inventive and witty, THE SWANSONG OF WILBUR MCCRUM tells a story of love, loss and luck – or, more accurately, the lack of it – in the Wild West of old.

Wilbur McCrum is not the luckiest man in the world. In fact, things don’t even begin well for him, as his birth coincides with his sister’s death, and his childhood is blighted by fits and a pathological fear of cows. Then, not long after the loss of his father, Wilbur himself is lost by his mother: lost deliberately, that is, when she decides she’d be better off without him. Thus dispossessed, and passed from pillar to post, Wilbur is eventually left with no choice but to take to the road, the wind at his back and a ‘lucky’ potato in his pocket.

As he searches for a place he can call home, he encounters madmen and conmen, men of God and women of the world, escapes bounty-hunters and body-snatchers, and embarks on a variety of careers including tending bars, brothels and books, not to mention robbing stagecoaches.

It’s when Wilbur first meets Ida May, the woman of his dreams, however, that is life is changed for good – although not necessarily for the better…