the tru history of ol time bandit billy miner is a fictional manuscript inspired by true life events. Miner is best known for being the first man to rob a train in Canada and using the phrase "Hands up and no one gets hurt." The story is written by two semi-literate men who meet Billy Miner just before his death at a Georgia prison farm in 1911. They are Howard Tobin, a yammering storyteller and professional tracker of chain gang runoffs, and Jeffery Wallace, a convicted thief working as a prison office clerk.

Unconventional in many ways, the novel is primarily written phonetically from what might be called an early 19th-century southern magnolia drawl, and in keeping with the historical period it is presented in a font derived from a 1910 typewriter. Further complicating, the novel offers no capital letters and little punctuation with humorous results.