I love, love, love all those 30s gangsters. Did a research paper for History 467, US Since 1933 with the redoubtable Sidney Fine, sophomore year of college on them and probably something similar in my excellent seminar on radical lit of the 30s with Brian Lloyd, and then found a used copy of this when it came out, then let it sit on the shelf for 2+ years. Buzzed through--big-book week: Perlstein's is a 748-pager and this one's 550.
Mostly a narrative history of 1933-34, in which we learn:
1. Burroughs' disillusionment with Bonnie and Clyde (I get the sense that he originally might have thought they were interesting, then did more research and found they were pointless thugs deserving of no cultural resonance whatsoever)
2. the venality but nothing more of Ma Barker (apparently a nice, scattered old lady who did a lot of jigsaw puzzles but whom J. Edgar Hoover made into a mastermind)
3. the ineptitude of the early FBI, which boasted a bunch of college boys with law degrees who couldn't shoot and apparently couldn't follow or capture anyone either.
4. what I presume is the regrettable inaccuracy of the Thompson machine gun (there are numerous scenes of gangsters and G-men firing wildly at each other, then everybody gets away, unless someone hit a car's radiator by blind luck); from Philip B. Sharpe, "The Thompson Sub-Machine Gun," American Inst. of Crim. Law 23 (1932-33): 1098:
The accuracy of the sub-machine gun is decidedly interesting. File records of the Auto-Ordnance firm indicate that in a Mann rest test fired at Hartford, Conn., May 2, 1921, the mean radius using a Remington Standard 230 grain bullet at 100 yards ran 1.89 inches. At 200 yards mean radius was 4.92 inches; at 300 yards 7.63 inches at 400 yards it increased to 18.31; while at 500 yards it jumped to 20.45 inches. Accordingly, one can assume that the accuracy of the more or less spent bullets is quite uncontrolled at the longer ranges. This writer suggests that the effective range of the weapon is under 300 yards....While the Thompson gun is a simple one to handle, it should not be used indiscriminately by any member of a police department. Machine gunning is a job requiring experience.
5. more excellent 30s slang, like "yeggs," "git" (the detailed getaway map for a bank robber), and more; shades of Miller's Crossing, with the timeless line, "We only take yeggs what's been to college"
6. Machine Gun Kelly was sort of a loser as a criminal, and Pretty Boy Floyd actually WAS good to the regular folks he encountered
7. and what should be a more shocking revelation that Burroughs underplays drastically, that the FBI beat criminals (sometimes with telephone books) and occasionally even held them out windows to induce confessions, Suge Knight style
In the single best sentence in the book, Burroughs mentions that the FBI got some Lithuanian-speakers to eavesdrop on the parents of Alvin Karpis, whom he lionizes as the smartest criminal of the period, in the hope that they might lead somewhere. (Excellent find: parts of his Alcatraz disciplinary record.) Instead, all they did was sit around arguing about who was more to blame for their son's life of crime. That's a great short story right there.
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