They died with blazing guns! (Public Enemies: The True Story of America's Greatest Crime Wave - Bryan Burrough)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Public Enemies: The True Story of America's Greatest Crime Wave - Bryan Burrough
Date:	15/10/09 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great, a real page-turner

Disadvantages: Sometimes presents speculation about what people were thinking as fact

Public Enemies: The True Story of America's Greatest Crime Wave is a non-fiction account of the FBI's 'War on Crime' of the early 1930s and the famous bankrobbers the Feds found themselves at war with. John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker are still well known names, even if few of them really deserve to be. A film adaptation of this was made recently, but unfortunately it was directed by Michael Mann, and looks to have been seriously miscast, so in this case I'd stick with the book.

The crime spree grew out of the Depression and was fairly rural. Apart from Chicago, the robbers rarely messed around with big cities - too many cops, too many mobsters (Baby Face Nelson incurred the wrath of the Chicago outfit). The most famous of the outlaws, John Dillinger, became something of a folk hero, with his claims that he was only taking money from the banks, not from normal folk. His public image was important to Dillinger, who regretted gunning down a cop more for the damage it did his reputation than out of any human feeling for the man and his family. Dillinger is the dominant figure in the book; he was one of the most competent, probably the most humane (not that that's saying much) and certainly the most spectacular of the robbers. Even 70+ years on, he's still a vivid part of American folklore, much like Billy the Kid or Jesse James.

But some of the others are no less interesting. Machine Gun Kelly and Pretty Boy Floyd weren't as major as their reputations suggest, but Baby Face Nelson (an out and out psycho), Bonne and Clyde (a delusional girl and her thuggish beau) and the Barker/Karpis gang are fascinating. Especially Alvin Karpis, who outlived most of his fellows by decades, and wrote his memoirs in the 70s. This inevitably means that there's more detail available about his exploits than those of some of the others.

The book's main source is the FBI's official files on the various cases. Following a massacre in Kansas City, the fledgling Bureau found itself publically associated with crimes it was in no way equipped to deal with. J Edgar Hoover, under pressure politically, had to produce results. The book is initially a catalogue of stupid decisions and catastrophic mistakes by the FBI, with Melvin Purvis, the agent famous for his involvement in the Dillinger case, being perhaps the worst offender. But they learned on the job, and by the end they were, if not quite a well-oiled crime-fighting machine, certainly a competent law enforcement agency. The book is as much about the growing professionalism of the G-Men as it is about the criminals they pursued.

At the centre of things sits J Edgar Hoover, already a malignant presence, making his agents' lives uncomfortable. He's not yet the monster he becomes in later life, but anyone with any knowledge of Hoover will be aware of the seething unpleasantness lurking under the surface. The FBI in this era used unethical methods such as abduction and torture, and invented the myth of Ma Barker as mastermind of the Barker/Karpis gang to get them off the hook for killing her (she was a harmless old lady who liked jigsaw puzzles. I assume she was the inspiration for Boney M's disco epic Ma Baker).

It's a well written book that reads almost like a thriller. I knew roughly how things would end, but not the precise details in most of the cases (it's all flagged for you early on in the book, just in case you thought that, say, Bonnie and Clyde lived until a ripe old age. Don't get too attached to anyone). I assume the author, Bryan Burrough, had at least half an eye on a film adaptation. It's a shame they made it into a movie - this would have been perfect as an HBO miniseries, a kind of cross between Deadwood and The Sopranos. I don't like the cover of the edition I have, with a picture of some actor - serves me right for forgetting to buy this when it had a better cover, I guess.

Still, this is good stuff - it recreates the world of the Depression-era bank robbers successfully and evokes the personalities of the leading players well (a bit too well in some cases - there are times when we're told what people were thinking, something there can be no way of knowing). You might even feel sorry for some of the criminals - Dillinger was a personable and talented chap, and it's hard not to share Karpis' frustration at the stupidity of his comrades. The womenfolk - including Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker - didn't really deserve the vitriol and violence heaped on them, which often reflected Hoover's misogyny as much as anything. But the book doesn't let anyone off the hook - there's a certain romantic appeal about the idea of bank robbers, but the people they murdered (and there were lots of them) were real, and had families. We're not allowed to forget the fear and brutality that was the flipside of the guilty pleasure many Americans felt when reading about their antics.

There are a few pages of photos, and the book begins with small portrait photos of each of the major players, so it's easy to flick back and get an image of who's who while you're reading. This is 550 pages, but feels shorter. Well worth the £9 it'll cost you (less if you buy online, I guess).

Summary: A great history of the Depression war on crime