Bullet Points: Still Hanging in There Edition

• The Strand Magazine is out today with its list of nominees for the 2020 Strand Critics Awards. The contenders are as follows:

Best Mystery Novel:
— Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown)
— The Lost Man, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)
— The Sentence Is Death, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
— Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
— Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke (Mulholland)
— The Border, by Don Winslow (Morrow)

Best Debut Novel:
— Scrublands, by Chris Hammer (Atria)
— Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim (Sarah Crichton)
— One Night Gone, by Tara Laskowski (Graydon House)
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Celadon)
— Three-Fifths, by John Vercher (Agora)

In addition, authors Walter Mosley and Tess Gerritsen will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Bronwen Hruska of Soho Press will be given the Publisher of the Year Award. Other winners will be announced during a virtual event come September 4.

• Earlier this week, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers announced the winners of its 2020 Scribe Awards, in seven categories. The only one focused on crime fiction appears to be “Original Novel—General.” And the winner there is Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Putnam). Competing for that same honor were Murder, My Love, by Max Allan Collins (Titan), and Murder, She Wrote: A Time for Murder, by Jon Land (Berkley).

• While we’re on the subject of literary prizes, let me also acknowledge the recipients of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards, which celebrate “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There were six categories of contenders, but it’s among the rivals for Best Novel that we find the most works of crime fiction. The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter (Two Dollar Radio), captured that title, beating out five other books: Curious Toys, by Elizabeth Hand (Little, Brown); Goodnight Stranger, by Miciah Bay Gault (Park Row); Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron); Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco); and Tinfoil Butterfly, by Rachel Eve Moulton (MCD x FSG Originals).

• A third Life on Mars series is a go! First, of course, came the 2006-2007 UK science-fiction police procedural Life on Mars, followed by its sequel, Ashes to Ashes. Now we can look forward to the “third and final installment of the story,” titled Lazarus. The Killing Times says Mars co-creator Matthew Graham plans a four- or five-episode run, and assures fans that all of the principal series stars—“John Simm, Phillip Glenister, and Keeley Hawes among them”—will be returning for Lazarus.

• Also from The Killing Times comes the welcome word that “Clerkenwell Films has picked up the rights to acclaimed Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard’s third novel, Rewind.

It tells the story of Andrew, the manager of Shanamore Holiday Cottages, who watches his only guest via a hidden camera in her room. One night the unthinkable happens: a shadowy figure emerges onscreen, kills her and destroys the camera. But who is the murderer? How did they know about the camera? And how will Andrew live with himself?

Natalie wishes she’d stayed at home as soon as she arrives in the wintry isolation of Shanamore. There’s something creepy about the manager. She wants to leave, but she can’t—not until she’s found what she’s looking for.

• Brian Busby, who blogs at The Dusty Bookcase, draws my attention to the under-reported demise of Canadian mystery writer Edward O. Phillips on May 30. He writes: “Ted—as he was known—may not be well-known south of the border, though he was published in the United States. In Canada, his debut, Sunday's Child (1981), was nominated for the First Novel Award. His 1986 novel, Buried on Sunday, won the Arthur Ellis Award.” Wikipedia says the author “was best known for his mystery novel series featuring gay detective Geoffrey Chadwick.” An obituary in The Montreal Gazette notes that Phillips, a lifelong Quebec resident, died “of complications from COVID-19.” He was 88 years old. The Globe and Mail offers its own Phillips obit here.

• Variety reports that Ace Atkins’ novels starring Quinn Colson, “a former Army Ranger who returns to his home in rural northeast Mississippi,” and becomes a sheriff, are being adapted into an HBO-TV drama. There are 10 Colson yarns, beginning with 2011’s The Ranger and including the latest entry, The Revelators (Putnam).

• Meanwhile, Oline H. Cogdill interviews Atkins for the Mystery Scene magazine blog. “The plan was to have 10 questions for 10 years of Quinn,” she explains. “Instead, we got a bit carried away.”

• Author Sheila Kohler puts forth the proposition, in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog, that Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century yarn, Don Quixote, was the first real crime novel.

• After scouring Ian Fleming’s novels for clues of every sort, William Boyd—who wrote the 2013 James Bond continuation novel, Solo—believes he’s found where British agent 007 lived in London. And it’s not far from the street where another spy-fiction celebrity, John le Carré’s George Smiley, had his own comfortable digs.

• For CrimeReads, Christina Schwarz offers a photo tour of sites familiar from the two years that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were on the run from law-enforcement officials in the 1930s.

• I remember sitting through the 1990 film Dick Tracy, based on Chester Gould’s comic-strip character and starring Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, and Madonna. The experience was tedious, the script “lousy” (to quote Max Allan Collins, who penned the movie tie-in novel), and the character’s no better than two-dimensional. Early expectations of Dick Tracy generating a movie franchise quickly fell by the wayside. But as Den of Geek reports, there were ideas for what a sequel might be, even if no script was developed. Dick Tracy screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. tells Den’s Mike Cecchini that the follow-up “would have seen a roughly ten-year jump in time, featured an older Junior [the police detective’s adopted son], and put Tracy in the midst of World War II.

“The sequel [would have been] something around munitions and war secrets,” Epps says “I probably would have gone to factories, because I was always amazed at how America turned into this armament industry. We had no weapons manufacturers before the war began, and by the end, we were a juggernaut, turning out planes in two, three days and things like that.”

To be clear, there were no plans to put Warren Beatty in uniform and send Tracy overseas to join the war effort on the frontlines. Dick Tracy 2 would have been strictly a domestic wartime affair.

• Bloggers Dru Ann Love, of Dru’s Book Musings, and BOLO Books’ Kristopher Zgorski have teamed up for a new YouTube venture, BOLO*MUSINGS. It’s been an opportunity, thus far, for them to chat about recent and upcoming crime/mystery novels. The second installment, posted this week, finds the pair discussing a dozen of their favorite works from the first half of 2020.

• Do you remember Vengeance Unlimited, the 1998 ABC-TV crime drama starring Michael Madsen? As Wikipedia recalls, Madsen played Mr. Chapel, “a mysterious stranger keen on serving justice to those who had been ignored by the law. To achieve those ends, Mr. Chapel made use of promised favors from former clients. People in trouble were usually contacted by Chapel with an envelope on their front doorstep containing newspaper clippings related to previous clients, along with the phone number 555-0132. When Mr. Chapel took a case, his demand was simple: either pay a fee of one million dollars, or promise to do a favor at some time in the future—whatever, whenever, wherever and for however long he needed you—then your debt would be paid in full. In the series pilot, it was clear that Mr. Chapel had been doing this for some time, as he called in a number of favors to help his current client.” Only 16 episodes of Vengeance Unlimited were broadcast, and recently a YouTube channel called Pop Zone posted them all. There’s no telling how long they’ll be available, though, before a copyright complaint provokes their disappearance.

Room for Interpretation

Anybody who’s read Jeff Guinn’s excellent 2009 book, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, knows that onetime Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (1884-1955)—who led the posse pursuing lovebirds/lawbreakers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in the early 1930s—had an ugly, brutal streak. Guinn notes that “By the end of his Ranger career [Hamer] was credited with killing fifty-three men ..” And though he was supposedly bothered by the idea of killing women, he had no trouble whatsoever ending Bonnie Parker’s life during a roadway ambush in northern Louisiana in May 1934.

As Guinn explains, Hamer “fired a burst into [an unarmed] Bonnie through the rear passenger window” of the outlaws’ stolen Ford V-8. “Then, when the car had completely stopped, the six-foot three-inch Hamer walked forward, leaned his towering frame over the front seat where Bonnie was slumped, and fired a final series of shots down through the window and windshield directly into her.”

So I was surprised by this In Reference to Murder item:

Netflix announced this past week that Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson will be playing Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and ex-partner Maney Gault in The Highwaymen, from director John Lee Hancock. This was the project that goes back far enough that it once had Paul Newman and Robert Redford ready to play those roles, before Newman’s health failed.

The plot focuses on Hamer and Gault coming out of
retirement to hunt down the notorious bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde. The lawmen were out of the Rangers by the time Bonnie and Clyde started their robbery reign, but were commissioned as special investigators, coaxed by a consortium of banks to assemble a posse and end the spree of the notorious gang reputed to have killed thirteen cops and others.

Let’s hope Netflix and director Hancock won’t try to whitewash Frank Hamer as some sort of great American hero, but will instead deliver a darker and more nuanced portrayal of the man.

READ MORE: “The Man Who Redeemed the Hamer Name,” by Henry C. Parke (True West).

Bullet Points: This and That Edition

• Things appear to be shaping up quite nicely for Scotland’s new Granite Noir festival. The Press and Journal reports that the inaugural event, set to take place in Aberdeen from February 24 to 26 of next year, “will feature famous literary guests including Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre, and the north-east’s own Stuart MacBride.”

• The blog It’s About TV! has posted this 1960 film clip in which author Brett Halliday (aka Davis Dresser) endorses the soon-to-debut—and ultimately short-lived—NBC-TV crime drama Michael Shayne, which starred Richard Denning as Halliday’s Miami private eye. Interestingly, one of the many Shayne novels conveniently displayed in front of the eye-patch-wearing Halliday in that clip is 1942’s The Corpse Came Calling, about which I wrote several years ago.

• In case you haven’t noticed yet, Mark Rogers’ excellent Web site, The Ironside Archive—devoted to the 1967-1975 Raymond Burr crime drama Ironside—is up and running once more. Rogers, a graphic designer in the UK, told me that he took his site down some while ago, “after I found it was attracting a lot of attention from some disturbed and disturbing people, who were looking for nude photos of the two regular female cast members, Barbara Anderson and Elizabeth Baur—and (more frighteningly) for images of them tied up.” Fortunately, the six-year-old Archive doesn’t seem to have suffered any during its time offline. In fact, that break allowed Rogers to upgrade his valuable Episode Guide.

• Another site of considerable interest is Reading Ellery Queen. There, museum curator/poet Jon Mathewson remarks on the numerous novels and short stories penned during the 20th century by cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay, who of course employed the joint pseudonym Ellery Queen. Mathewson also looks at fictional sleuth Queen’s appearances in other media, such as in the 1971 NBC-TV pilot Don’t Look Behind You (with a terribly miscast Peter Lawford in the lead role) and the far superior, 1975-1976 NBC series Ellery Queen (about which I wrote here). Mathewson says he’s now “read all but one [of the Queen novels]: the unfinished manuscript for The Tragedy of Errors.” If so, that puts him far ahead of me. I’ve enjoyed a couple of dozen Queen yarns, but still have a boxful of vintage paperback editions to open. Something to look forward to, indeed.

• TV writer-producer Ken Levine has some favorable things to say about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the 1969 film made from Ian Fleming’s 1963 James Bond novel of that same name. “It’s pretty much the forgotten Bond film,” Levine writes, “because it was the only one that starred George Lazenby. He had the misfortune of replacing Sean Connery and for good measure, was not an accomplished actor. He was more of a male model. … But the plot was pretty good. It stayed very true to Ian Fleming’s book and was a lot more realistic than later 007 adventures where he’s on the moon or taking Denise Richards seriously.”

• Meanwhile, Film Noir of the Week takes a look back at the 1997 motion picture L.A. Confidential—“a paradise with secrets behind every palm tree”—based on James Ellroy’s 1990 novel.

• R.I.P., former Barney Miller co-star Ron Glass.

• If you’re keeping track of bloggers delivering their “best novels of 2016” lists, here’s one from Australian booksellers Jon and Kate Page. Note than among their choices is Jane Harper’s The Dry, a debut work finally due out in the States come in January.

• The Amazon book-sales site has its own top-picks rundown of mysteries and thrillers published in 2016. Its choices include Carl Hiaasen’s Razor Girl, Graham Moore’s The Last Days of Night, Amy Gentry’s Good as Gone, and Bill Beverly’s Dodgers.

• And I don’t think I mentioned this necessarily opinionated tally of the year’s “best crime and thriller novels” by Jake Kerridge of the British Telegraph. Strangely, it appeared last June, so might not be as comprehensive as it could have been. But Kerridge does mention one novel I’m looking forward to reading: Jill Dawson’s The Crime Writer, which will finally receive a U.S. release this coming June.

• Because I’ve written at some length in the past about early 20th-century American outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (see here and here), I was interested to glance through the design blog Eleven-Nineteen’s collection of photographs celebrating their ill-fated, Depression-era romance. “What’s odd,” observes Jon Wessel, “is that Bonnie and Clyde took so many pictures. Pictures of themselves, their gang, their guns, their loot. They would have been social media sensations had it been 40 years later.”

• The Defenders: Season 1, released in DVD format by Shout Factory! a few months back, is on my Christmas list, and I’m hoping to find it under the tree soon. If and when it appears, I shall be curious to see whether I agree with the Classic Film and TV Café’s recent selection of “the five best episodes” from that 1961 premiere season of the acclaimed CBS courtroom drama.

• After writing recently in my book-art blog, Killer Covers, about Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 political novel, It Can’t Happen Here, I received a note pointing me toward this excellent pre-election piece in The Washington Post, which finds book critic Carlos Lozada musing on how Donald Trump compares with the fictional dictators imagined by both Lewis and by Philip Roth, in 2004’s The Plot Against America.

• By the way, Money magazine notes that in the wake of Trump’s win, copies of It Can’t Happen Here have “sold out on some major online book retailers.” Fear of what the billionaire bigot might do in office can surely be credited with this purchasing stampede.

• While we’re on the subject of this month’s disastrous presidential election, here’s a quote from Washington Monthly that likely echoes many a voter’s thoughts: “The psychological shock progressives felt on November 8 will be minor compared to the shock they will feel on January 20. Not since Bill Clinton turned the White House over to George W. Bush has there been such a disparity in terms of decency and dignity between an outgoing and incoming President.”

• Grrr! As much as I enjoy writing about crime fiction for the Kirkus Reviews Web site, I am frustrated by the fact that reader comments on my biweekly pieces, along with their Facebook “share” counts—both of which are handled, apparently, through Facebook—periodically just … disappear. That happened again this last weekend, when the “share” number on several of my latest columns, after having climbed into the hundreds, suddenly plummeted back to zero. Sigh …

• In a trio of worthwhile author interviews, blogger S.W. Lauden fires questions at Andrew Nette (Gunshine State), Bob Truluck (The Big Nothing), and Angel Luis Colón (No Happy Endings).

• Since I somehow neglected to mention Neil S. Plakcy’s recent post for Criminal Element about the history of gay and lesbian characters in crime fiction, and how the writers responsible for those players influenced Plakcy’s own storytelling (The Next One Will Kill You), let me do it here and now.

• Finally, don’t fret any if The Rap Sheet goes quiet towards the end of this week. I’m taking a bit of time off, hoping to refresh my batteries before the coming holiday posting rush. You’ll hear much more from this corner of the Web next week.

Bullet Points: Eighth Anniversary Edition

Believe it or not, I forgot about The Rap Sheet’s anniversary last week. This blog marked the end of its eighth year in business on Thursday, May 22. In previous years, I’ve made a big production of these milestones. But I was too involved over the last several days in putting together my piece about eight decades having passed since Bonnie and Clyde were killed, as well as a column to be posted in Kirkus Reviews this coming Tuesday. The Rap Sheet’s anniversary … well, it simply slipped my mind. But I ought not let the occasion pass without at least thanking everybody who reads and comments on this blog, and especially those people who have been kind enough to pitch a few dollars into the pot now and then to keep it going. It’s astounding to think that I launched The Rap Sheet way back in May 2006, and have since benefited from contributions by such talented folks as Linda L. Richards, Ali Karim, and the other “Usual Suspects” to enhance its Web presence.

Now on with this weekend’s edition of quick newsy hits:

• Crime-fiction blogs come and go, but some of them go … and then come back eventually! Two examples: Cullen Gallagher’s Pulp Serenade, which went dormant in December 2012, only to suddenly kick back into gear (while I wasn’t paying attention) in late April; and Zachary Klein’s Just Sayin’, which the author put on hiatus last December, but which he promises to reinvigorate tomorrow. Welcome back, guys!

• Memorial Day mysteries for your holiday reading pleasure.

• I was honored a few months ago to be asked to contribute to the seventh issue of Black Scat Review, a publication edited by “Norman Conquest,” better known as Derek Pell. Since the theme of the issue was going to be “Lit Noir,” I decided to compose an essay about how I first became interested in crime fiction, and how that curiosity provoked my subsequent obsession with vintage detective yarns (and their often-beautiful covers). The “Lit Noir” issue, finally released late last week, also includes work by Kelli Stanley, John Nickle, Michael Hemmingson, and Michelle Gray. You can purchase a copy of Black Scat Review for yourself here, in either print or digital formats.

• Speaking of Conquest/Pell, he’s celebrating this holiday weekend on his Facebook page with what he describes as “a marathon (some might say orgy) of posted excerpts from my unpublished manuscript Missing Mysteries: A Pictorial History of Nonexistent Mysteries (1840-2013). [It’s] a 200-paged monster, featuring rare cover art and descriptions, and covering nearly 100 little-known subgenres.” If you’re not a “friend” of the author, you can still check out Missing Mysteries here.

• In a fun piece for Criminal Element, Edward A. Grainger (aka David Cranmer) offers a list of 10 fictional modern cowboys endowed with grit, including Raylan Givens from Justified, Walt Longmire from Longmire, and Sam McCloud from McCloud.

• That same blog hosts Jake Hinkson’s list of books that should be of particular interest to fledgling film noir geeks.

• Fears that Edgar Allan Poe’s old home, long an attraction in Baltimore, Maryland--and a National Landmark--would not reopen came to naught yesterday, when the residence welcomed back visitors.

• Really, another Bonnie and Clyde film? My recent focus on that pair of Depression-era outlaws led me to this story from The Wrap, which says that “Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke and X-Men actor Nicholas Hoult will play [the bank-robbing duo] … in [director] Michael Sucsy’s Go Down Together,” a picture adapted from Jeff Guinn’s thoroughly engrossing 2009 non-fiction book of the same name. Who knows how this latest cinematic interpretation of the Bonnie Parker-Clyde Barrow adventure will turn out (and whether it will ever be released), but I’m not encouraged by production notes saying that “Bonnie Parker was a prostitute before joining up with and eventually going down in a hail of bullets with Barrow.” Guinn’s contention that Bonnie may have offered sex for pay prior to her criminal escapades has been strongly denied by her niece, and is only mentioned in passing in Guinn’s book. That the filmmakers emphasize this allegation makes me think the production Sucsy has in mind will be no less sensationalized and distorted than its predecessors. Too bad.

• More promising entertainment might be had from The Escape Artist, a British drama/thriller starring David Tennant and scheduled to be broadcast on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece, beginning on Sunday, June 15. Although it showed in the UK as a three-part miniseries, Masterpiece is offering The Escape Artist in two parts. Find out more about this program and watch a preview in Mystery Fanfare.

• Anybody want to buy Dracula’s bathroom-less castle?

• Being a longtime fan of South African novelist James McClure, creator of the Apartheid-era Tromp Kramer-Mickey Zondi series, I was happy to read in Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Without Borders that “a collection of McClure’s short stories and scripts,” titled God It Was Fun, is now available. Unfortunately, I only see an e-book version of this work, which isn’t going to cut it with someone like me, who hasn’t successfully read an e-book yet. I’m strictly a print-edition guy.

• Max Allan Collins (King of the Weeds) had a delightful piece in The Huffington Post last week about long-running fictional sleuths who have, or have not, been allowed to age. Read the essay here.

• It’s hard to keep up anymore with all of the Internet blogathons either underway or in the works. But this one caught my attention: a June 2-5 celebration of the many classic small-screen series now broadcast on MeTV. Among the focuses of planned posts are Peter Gunn, The Saint, Columbo, and Adam-12. You’ll find the schedule here.

• I’m not convinced Dashiell Hammett would have approved: In this February 28, 1958, episode of the Peter Lawford-Phyllis Kirk series, The Thin Man, the married detectives meet Robby the Robot.

• If you’ve ever thought about spiffing up your bookcases with some handsomely produced editions of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, this new four-volume set published by The Folio Society might be just what you need.

• Has it really been 20 years since the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction? The Dissolve commemorates this occasion with a look back at “five great shots” from that influential film.

• Wow, this is quite a treat: The blog Where Danger Lives has put together a colorful gallery of “50 Extraordinary Noir and Crime Posters from Republic Pictures!”

• How sad it is to hear that Leslie Thomas, the British author who came to fame with his 1966 comic novel, The Virgin Soldiers, died earlier this month at age 83. My first experience with Thomas’ fiction came courtesy of the 1976 Dell paperback release of Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective. As The Gumshoe Site recalls, that novel “was turned into the 1981 TV movie of the same name starring Bernard Cribbins as the CID officer in the London borough of Willesden, with Thomas and director Val Guest co-writing the script. Also, The Last Detective became [a] TV series starring Peter Davison, with 17 episodes broadcast from 2003 [to] 2007.”

• Are women hooked on violent crime fiction? According to The Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, the answer is “yes.” She writes: “Friends can spend hours online, reading about serial killers. I myself became fascinated by the Black Dahlia case in the 1940s, after reading a reference to it in a crime novel. The female author Jessie Keane says that consuming crime fiction allows women to examine violence ‘in a safe way.’ In other words, we are attempting to address our fears.”

• Two interviews worth reading: Anthony Neil Smith, the author most recently of XXX Shamus (published under the pseudonym Red Hammond), talks with Crimespree Magazine, while Reed Farrel Coleman (The Hollow Girl) fields a few questions from MysteryPeople.

• And if you’ve tired of crime and thriller novels backdropped by such familiar locales as New York City, London, and Scandinavia, take a gander at Crime Fiction Lover’s list of “The 10 Most Unexpected Crime Fiction Settings.” American Samoa, anyone?

Glamorized Bumblers, Dead in Seconds

Early on the morning of May 23, 1934--80 years ago today--a stolen Cordoba gray, four-door Ford V-8 left the town of Gibsland, in northern Louisiana, and headed south. The car’s two passengers--both well-publicized outlaws, the man having recently turned 25 years old, the woman only 23--were speeding to a rendezvous with a criminal accomplice. They were already late. But on a rural road in Bienville Parish, off Highway 154, they spotted their gang member’s father, his old truck apparently disabled on the side of the rutted dirt lane. They stopped to lend assistance.

And that’s the moment when all hell broke loose.

One of six lawmen who’d been waiting at that point on the road to ambush the car suddenly leaped to his feet and began firing his rifle into the sedan. He wasn’t supposed to have done that. As the story goes, the man in charge of the posse, a former Texas Ranger named Frank Hamer, was going to call out for the couple in the car to surrender. Once the firing commenced, though, there was no turning back. One of the first bullets killed the driver, passing through the Ford’s windshield and carving a vicious path through the young wheelman’s head. He died instantly, and as he did so, his foot slipped off the clutch, letting the Ford roll forward toward a ditch at the side of the road. The slender, petite woman in the passenger seat screamed, “a high shrill wail that haunted the men about to kill her for the rest of their lives.” Although there was talk later on that those two outlaws had fired at the posse, and they’d fired back in self-defense, the fact was that the several guns the couple had packed along with them were laid out on the Ford’s backseat, because there wasn’t enough room in front to keep them handy.

In short order, 150 or more bullets were blasted at the car, some ricocheting off, others getting trapped in the Ford’s metal body, but enough whizzing through the doors and windows to murder both occupants several times over. Hamer himself fired a barrage of bullets through the passenger-side window, making sure that the young strawberry blonde--already slumped down in her seat, covered with blood--wouldn’t be leaving the scene alive.

That cacophonous ambuscade lasted only about 16 seconds, but it concluded Hamer’s 102-day pursuit of the outlaw pair--and put a violent stop to the notorious two-year criminal careers of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Those misguided lovers from the wrong side of the tracks in Dallas, Texas, weren’t the brightest, most crafty crooks roaming Depression-era America; in fact, they could fairly be called ardent bumblers. They remained at large and alive as long as they did, mostly because communications were pretty poor in the 1930s, and law-enforcement agencies didn’t do well at sharing information. Yet in that era when the news media and FBI were hot on the trails of more skilled malfactors, such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, Barrow and Parker received a lot more publicity for their hold-ups of banks, gas stations, and country stores (as well as for crimes they didn’t commit) than they might have had they been operating in isolation.

(Left) Bonnie Parker in full “moll” mode.

In his fascinating 2009 book, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, Jeff Guinn recalls how distorted public impressions of the couple became:

Thanks to newsreels at movie theaters and photos transmitted to newspapers through the recent magic of wire services, most Americans believed they knew exactly what Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker looked like. The young couple loved to strike dramatic poses for the cameras that they carried along with their guns, and some of these pictures had fallen into the hands of lawmen who made them available to the media. So the nation became familiar with nattily dressed Clyde brandishing a menacing Browning Automatic Rifle, and with Bonnie assuming unladylike postures on the bumpers of stolen cars. The most famous photo showed Bonnie with a cigar dangling from the corner of her mouth, a particularly eye-catching image in a time when most respectable women would discreetly puff cigarettes in private. Thanks to the media, Clyde and Bonnie had quickly come to be considered the epitome of scandalous glamour. But in person Clyde was short and scrawny, and Bonnie’s looks were ordinary. They were both crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his own toes in prison and Bonnie as the result of a car wreck nine months earlier in which her right leg was burned so badly that bone was visible in several places. She hopped now rather than walked. Clyde often had to carry her. They had little in common with the glittering images of themselves that mesmerized the public.

Despite the fact that many Americans of the time romanticized the crimes and screeching-tire escapes performed by Barrow and Parker--portraying them as “Romeo and Juliet in a getaway car”--the pair weren’t innocents; they were complicit in a few deaths along the way, and their robberies didn’t just hurt people who could afford such troubles. Over the last eight decades, their adventures have been seriously mythologized by Hollywood; while Arthur Penn’s 1967 big-screen picture, Bonnie and Clyde (starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) and last year’s TV miniseries Bonnie & Clyde (previewed here) offer compelling stories, they shouldn’t be considered truthful re-tellings of events. Clyde and Bonnie were just two young people looking for better lives at a time when a broken U.S. economy respected nobody who wasn’t well-to-do. These two didn’t have to die in the violent, cinematic way they did, on that lonely back road in Bienville Parish, filled with hot lead. However, they also didn’t expect to perish in any other way than that. Just days before the ambush, Bonnie told the cousin of an acquaintance to “never go crooked,” adding “it’s for the love of a man than I’m gonna have to die … I don’t know when, but I know it can’t be long.”

Today, the town of Gibsland (pop. 979) will hold its annual Bonnie and Clyde festival, complete with live entertainment, a jambalaya feed, and a lookalike competition to find matches for Bonnie, Clyde, and the posse members who assassinated them. Meanwhile, there’s likely to be more attention than usual around the so-called Bonnie and Clyde Death Car, the Ford V-8 in which that pair met their end, and which is currently on display at Whiskey Pete’s Hotel & Casino in Primm, Nevada--bullet holes and all. If you aren’t planning to be in either of those towns this afternoon, at least you can check out the video below, a simplistic but not overly sensationalized account of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s two-year criminal run, originally presented in 2009 as part of Britain’s Timewatch documentary series.



READ MORE: “Legacy of Dallas-based Bank Robbers Bonnie and Clyde Lives On,” by Tristan Hallman (The Dallas Morning News); “Bonnie and Clyde Gunned Down 80 Years Ago Today,” by Adam Duvernay (Shreveport Times); “Bonnie & Clyde Met Violent Death 80 Years Ago,” by Paul Prost (The Saratogian); “Bonnie and Clyde--13 Things You May Not Know About America’s Most Infamous Outlaw Couple” (Vintage Everyday); “10 Things You May Not Know About Bonnie and Clyde,” by Christopher Klein (History.com).

“Romeo and Juliet in a Getaway Car”

As Nobody Move! blogger John DuMond reminds us, today is the 75th anniversary of the ambush slayings of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, known to history as the Depression-era gangsters Bonnie and Clyde. “Their exploits were known nationwide,” explains their entry in Wikipedia. “They captured the attention of the American press and its readership during what is sometimes referred to as the ‘public enemy era’ between 1931 and 1934. Though their gang was notorious for their bank robberies, Barrow preferred to rob small stores or gas stations. The gang was believed to have killed at least nine police officers, among several other murders.”

As Joseph Geringer recalls in a satisfyingly long article for the TruTV Web site:

Bonnie and Clyde were meant for each other. And they clung to each other while they fought back against the elements. These elements were destitution and a government they took for its face value. They were children of a nationwide economic depression that not unlike France in the late 1700s had its upheaval--and those who tried to keep small the size and impact of the upheavals.

An anger dwelt within Clyde, having been born ragged and made more ragged by the Depression. He sometimes killed in cold blood, and always tried to justify the murders as if he had a right to pull that trigger, thus releasing somehow the seething that built up like a volcano deep inside him. Perhaps he actually believed in his own special privilege. As the fame of Bonnie and Clyde grew, they shot their way out of police loops, each time growing tighter and tighter, and claimed that the “laws” they killed just happened to get in the way between their fiery outcry and the rest of the country. Their killings were not personal, they contended. But, the government took them personal. And Bonnie and her man were marked for death. ...

While they terrorized banks and store owners in five states--Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Louisiana, and New Mexico--Americans thrilled to their “Robin Hood” adventures. The presence of a female, Bonnie, escalated the sincerity of their intentions to make them something unique and individual--even at times heroic--and above similar activities of all-male motor bandits like John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson and “Pretty Boy” Floyd.

However, that notoriety ended suddenly in a screaming hail of bullets on the morning of May 23, 1934, when a posse of six lawmen, four of them from Texas, two from Louisiana, opened fire on the couple as they drove along a quiet northern Louisiana road in their new Cordoba gray, four-door Ford V-8. In his book, Ambush: The True Story of Bonnie and Clyde, Ted Hinton, one of the officers who took part in that bloody incident, recalled what happened next:

“Bonnie screams, and I fire and everyone fires ... My BAR [Browning Automatic Rifle] spits out twenty shots in an instant, and a drumbeat of shells knifes through the steel body of the car, and glass is shattering. For a fleeting instant, the car seems to melt and hang in a kind of eerie and animated suspension, trying to move forward, spitting gravel at the wheels, but unable to break through the shield of withering gunfire. ... My ears are ringing, there is a spinning and reeling in my head from the cannonade of bullets and the clank of steel-jacketed metal tearing steel. ...” And when the firing subsided ... “Clyde is slumped forward, the back of his head a mat of blood ... I scramble over the hood of the car and throw open the door on Bonnie’s side. The impression will linger with me from this instant--I see her falling out of the opened door, a beautiful and petite young girl ... and I smell a light perfume against the burned-cordite smell of gunpowder ...”

Estimates of the ammunition emptied into that Ford sedan vary from 130 to 1,500 rounds (the latter being most dubious). The film embedded below, supposedly taken “by an amateur photographer five minutes after the shooting,” gives you a pretty clear idea of the violence involved in the ambuscade.



Today, the spot where Bonnie and Clyde ended their lives--on Louisiana Highway 154 south of Gibsland--is marked by a small stone monument, put up in 1972, five years after the release of the movie Bonnie and Clyde, which starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. That marker “has since been covered with graffiti, gouged with axes, and blasted with gunfire to the point where its inscription is barely legible,” according to an article at the travel Web site Roadside America. “The many hearts and intertwined initials scrawled on the monument suggest that young couples often make pilgrimages here, digging the Bonnie and Clyde outlaw vibe. The romantic vandalism somehow seems appropriate. Bonnie and Clyde would have defaced monuments too.”

In recent years decades, Gibsland has become home to a well-touristed Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum, particularly popular with families, we’re told. And every year, that town of just over 1,100 people hosts a Bonnie and Clyde Festival--the latest version of which began today. With a new big-screen feature about the “rogue Romeo and Juliet of Depression America,” this one headlined by Hillary Duff and Kevin Zegers, set to begin filming in central Louisiana in late July, one can only assume that Gibsland will have even more to celebrate next year.

READ MORE: “Adios, Bonnie and Clyde,” by Thomas Pluck (Criminal Element); “Bonnie and Clyde Redux: The Year of the Gangster, Part 3” (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation).

Bullet Points: All Over the Map Edition

• CrimeFest 2009 concluded yesterday in Bristol, England. Undoubtedly, the wrap-up posts will continue for a while yet (I’m expecting Ali Karim, for one, to recount highlights in The Rap Sheet at some time soon), but a few have already trickled in. Ayo Onatade drops a sixth report into Shotsmag Confidential (the rest of her coverage can be found here), while Peter Rozovsky covers the doings of Day IV here (with all of his CrimeFest posts available here), and Uriah Robinson offers the first of his related posts at this location. UPDATE: Petrona blogger Maxine Clarke has some things to say about her own “three special highlights” from CrimeFest.

• Fans of the late George C. Chesbro should be on the lookout for the June 2009 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, if they don’t have a copy already. It contains the author’s last short story, “Home Inversion,” featuring Garth Frederickson.

• Bury Me Deep, the latest novel from Rap Sheet contributor Megan Abbott, is among New York Magazine’s picks of the best books to read this summer. Carl Rosen summarizes the plot thusly:

In 1931, a young wife, Marion Seeley, is deposited by her husband on the steps of a TB ward in Phoenix. Eager to escape her job as a medical secretary among the “lungers,” as patients are known, Marion quickly falls in with the wrong crowd: fading flappers with marcelled bobs and blank eyes. Enter Gentleman Joe, a married “wet druggist” who is all about the “business of ruin.” He unlocks a dark obsession in Marion, and, true to noir style, desperate passions lead to despicable actions. In this novel based on the true-life case of the “Trunk Murderess,” Abbott turns the stuff of sensational confession magazines into a rich meditation on the unclouded depths of the soul.

Bury Me Deep is due out in early July. Also chosen by New York: Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places. Two more books I must find time to read in the coming months.

• It hardly makes up for the bad news that NBC’s Life has been cancelled after only two seasons. But fans of that distinctive TV cop series starring the quirky Damien Lewis and the fetching Sarah Shahi will be happy to learn that a five-disc set of Season 2 is scheduled for DVD release on August 25.

• Looking for reading recommendations? Acclaimed British writer John Harvey (Far Cry) has posted a list of “20 crime, or close, novels from which I have derived more than usual pleasure, and which I’ve re-read at least once if not several times.” I’m feeling pretty smug that I have read most of his selections. Harvey’s list is here.

• Making the publicity rounds: Reed Farrel Coleman (Empty Ever After) is interviewed by National Public Radio’s Maureen Corrigan, while Laura Lippman (Life Sentences) chats it up with late-night TV host Craig Ferguson.

• Derringer Award-winning writer John Weagly is the author of this week’s short story at Beat to a Pulp, “Oral Eruptions.”

• From the “Fun Facts to Know and Tell” file: Chris Knopf, author of the new Sam Acquillo, Hard Stop, was “‘personally rejected from graduate school in writing’ by none other than novelist John Barth”--or so he informs the Hartford Courant.

• Jeremy Duns, author of the new Cold War thriller Free Agent, “reveals his ten favorite real espionage inventions” to the London Times. Read all about them here.

• Along the same lines, but strictly for amateurs ...

• Author and old movie buff Arthur Lyons may have passed away in March 2008, but his name lives on. What used to be known simply as the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival has been rechristened the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival, and will begin this year on May 28.

• John Hart, the Edgar Award-winning author of the new novel The Last Child, is the guest all this week at Minotaur Books’ Moments in Crime blog. You can keep up with his posts here.

• Castle Freeman Jr. (All That I Have) is interviewed by John Kenyon at Things I’d Rather Be Doing.

• Blogger Jen Forbus of Jen’s Book Thoughts interviews Stanley Trollip and Michael Sears, who under the combined pseudonym “Michael Stanley” wrote last year’s A Carrion Death--introducing Botswanan detective David “Kubu” Bengu--and next month follow up with The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu.

• Readers who enjoyed Philip Kerr’s fifth Bernie Gunther novel, A Quiet Flame (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2008) will be pleased to hear that Kerr has another installment of that series, If the Dead Rise Not, planned for release by Quercus in September of this year. The write-up at Amazon UK casts it as a prequel:

Berlin 1934. The Nazis have been in power for just eighteen months but already Germany has seen some unpleasant changes. As the city prepares to host the 1936 Olympics, Jews are being expelled from all German sporting organizations--a blatant example of discrimination. Forced to resign as a homicide detective with Berlin’s Criminal Police, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. The discovery of two bodies--one a businessman and the other a Jewish boxer--involves Bernie in the lives of two hotel guests. One is a beautiful left-wing journalist intent on persuading America to boycott the Berlin Olympiad; the other is a German-Jewish gangster who plans to use the Olympics to enrich himself and the Chicago mob. As events unfold, Bernie uncovers a vast labour and construction racket designed to take advantage of the huge sums the Nazis are prepared to spend to showcase the new Germany to the world. It is a plot that finds its conclusion twenty years later in pre-revolution Cuba, the country to which Bernie flees from Argentina at the end of A Quiet Flame.

• Will you be attending the 75th anniversary celebration of the killings of Depression-era robbers Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker this weekend in Gibsland, Louisiana? As the Associated Press reports, the place where those larcenous lovers made their last stand “will again buzz with activity on Saturday when actors re-create the ambush that pumped more than 100 bullets into the couple. It’s one of four re-enactments planned for the festival, which will also include a pancake breakfast, parade, Bonnie and Clyde look-alike contest.”

• Lee Child is Molly Pesce’s latest guest on the Barnes & Noble video series Tagged! What may be most interesting about their exchange is the estimation that Child (Gone Tomorrow) sells “a book a second.” Absolutely astonishing!

• Stephanie Pintoff, winner of the 2008 St. Martin’s Minotaur/Mystery Writers of America Best First Crime Novel Award, talks with blogger Lesa Holstine about her debut historical thriller, In the Shadow of Gotham.

• Being rather modest, I tend to downplay compliments to me or the products with which I am associated. However, veteran novelist Ed Gorman had such a nice comment about The Rap Sheet recently that I’d like to share it with the other people who have helped make this now almost-three-year-old blog a success. To quote:

If there’s such a place as the indispensable mystery site, it has to be The Rap Sheet. This week editor-writer Jeff Pierce demonstrates his talent for constantly giving his readers the kind and quality of material they won’t find anywhere else. I’m referring here to his interview with the son of the late paperback writer Robert Terrall. A good share of Jeff's material should be preserved in book form and this piece is just one example.

• And two more books go through the Page 69 Test ringer: Rebecca Cantrell’s A Trace of Smoke and Philip Baruth’s The Brothers Boswell.