James Carlos Blake, whose savage, lyrical novels about outlaws, bootleggers and gunslinging murderers resurrected the violent history of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, drawing comparisons to titans of American letters like Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, died on Jan. 11 in Venice, Fla. He was 81.

His brother Rick said the cause of his death, at a nursing care facility, was pneumonia.

Mr. Blake, the descendant of a 19th-century English pirate who was executed by a firing squad, was born in Mexico but grew up in a Texas border town. There he learned that some forms of violence — in his case, decking racist classmates who called him a “greaser” — had a certain nobility.

Rebellious, nomadic and prone to divorce (he was married four times), Mr. Blake was nearly as colorful a character as the ones who populated his fiction. Before turning to writing full time in his late 30s, he had been a paratrooper, snake catcher, mechanic, swimming-pool maintenance man, jail officer and teacher.

“The more experiences a writer’s had in his earlier, pre-writer life, the luckier he is, because those experiences will compose the main well of insight he has about life, insight that of course has plenty to do with the degree of truth in his work,” Mr. Blake told Firsts, a magazine for book collectors, in 2001.

Mr. Blake published his debut novel, “The Pistoleer,” in 1995. The book reimagines the life of the Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, a notorious Texas outlaw during Reconstruction. He followed with “The Friends of Pancho Villa” (1996), set during the Mexican Revolution.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.