"Lucky Billy": A grown-up profile of Billy the Kid There seem to be two ways to write a historical novel. One is to lay out all the facts before the reader, with a glossary, a guide to the book's dramatis personae, a chronology of the period's watershed events and other devices to help place the reader comfortably in the story's context. The other is to drop the reader into the midst of unfamiliar surroundings and let him experience them as their inhabitants experienced them — unpredictably, with the ultimate outcome unknown. John Vernon ("Peter Doyle," "The Last Canyon") adopts Method No. 2 in his new novel about Billy the Kid. He throws you in among a welter of changing names and shifting alliances as he plays with chronology and alternates point-of-view. From his complex layers of narrative, startling landscapes emerge — and so do startling characters. "Lucky Billy" is, among other things, a tale of free enterprise run amok. Set mostly in New Mexico in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it tells of a troubled youngster's entanglement in the Lincoln County War of 1878 — a small-town conflict between rival merchant-ranchers that escalated into a blood feud. Both trigger-happy sides, convinced they had the law behind them, wound up deputizing themselves and taking out warrants for the others' arrest....