Hollywood has made multiple versions about Billy the Kid: from King Vidor's 1930 one to Sam Peckinpah's 1973 one, without forgetting the interpretation Paul Newman gave in 1958. But the surgical gaze of the French writer Éric Vuillard (Lyon, 1968) shows another type of violence, far removed from any romanticism. After narrating the French Revolution from the point of view of the people on the street in 14 July (2016), and unmasking the great economic powers that made possible the rise of Nazism in The Order of the Day (Goncourt Prize 2017), Vuillard returns to put the magnifying glass on the dirty laundry of power in The Desperate Ones. A History of Billy the Kid (Edicions 62 / Tusquets), with a Catalan translation by Jordi Martín Lloret.