A vow the Texas Rangers hoped to make come true. They vowed the only thing that would ever separate them was a bullet.

In an era that gave birth to the likes of Al Capone, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde were to become America’s version of Romeo and Juliet with guns! Their love for each other was without rhyme or reason, their bond unbreakable. She wanted to be an actress and he wanted to rob banks. They were star crossed lovers who blazed across the hot southwest in a time of drought and trouble. He had a pretty face and a smooth way of talking and she liked his silk shirt and the way he fit into it. He had that look: those dark, secretive eyes that never looked directly into yours. If there was ever a bad boy, it was Clyde Chestnut Barrow. Writing with the same combination of lyricism and earthy prose that he used to create the western classic, The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid, Bill Brooks plays the medium for Pretty Boy, his partners, lovers, and his enemies.įrom the critically acclaimed author of The Stone Garden he preferred guys with an edge to them. From the opening pages to the final chapter, we hear Charley and his pals, his lovers, and his family tell us the story of Pretty Boy Floyd. The local newspapers were full of stories about guys like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, and Al Capone, but none of them had what Pretty Boy had: uncommon good luck, a taste for fancy clothes, fancy cars, and beautiful dames. And while Bonnie and Clyde were tearing up the country, robbing and shooting their way across the Southwest Charley knew them both, cared for neither Charley was robbing banks from Kansas City to Ohio. I was the most wanted man in America.’Rising out of the harvests and oil fields of the Oklahoma dustbowl that John Steinbeck so poignantly captured in The Grapes of Wrath, Pretty Boy Floyd became the most wanted man in America by the newly formed FBI and the woman who loved him. ‘I was the dreamer, the seeker of all things beyond my reach, the dandy, the dancer, the lover of countless woman, the bank robber, the husband, the father, the son, the brother. ‘As I lay dying, I see Daddy Walter sitting on the porch reading a Bible sold to him by a man wearing spats.’ Thus begins the novel of Charles Arthur Floyd, best known to depression era America as Pretty Boy Floyd.

Bad Book by K.S. Brooks