Pretty Boy: The Epic Life of Pretty Boy Floyd - Hardcover

Brooks, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765304732 ISBN 13: 9780765304735

Publisher: Forge Books, 2003

Synopsis

"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. "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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

About this title

About the Author

Bill Brooks lives with his wife in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where he works as a journalist and teaches at Asheville Buncombe Community College. He is the author of the historical classics The Stone Garden, which received a Booklist starred review comparing the book to The Virginian and Hombre and Pretty Boy, a novel based on the life of Pretty Boy Floyd.

From Publishers Weekly

Live fast and die young, urges this lurid, punchy, mawkish fictionalization of the life of Pretty Boy Floyd, the most wanted man in Depression-era America. Brooks, author of The Stone Garden: The Epic Life of Billy the Kid, styles Floyd as a romantic outlaw, a dreamer who believes bank robbery is his ticket out of the cotton fields and into the high life of fast cars, flashy clothes and, above all, easy women. Framed in first-person monologues by Floyd and associated family, felons and floozies, the vividly rendered stock characters speak in colorful, antiquated slang ("Jeez Louise... ain't this the greatest!") and hard-boiled truisms ("I'm tired of getting shot. It's something you don't get used to"), while the story unfolds in formulaic gangster-movie scenarios, complete with cinematic shootouts and tawdry speakeasy atmospherics. Brooks handles the pulpy material with wit and vigor, though he endows it with emotional turgidity. The hollowness of bank robbery and floozies drives Pretty Boy back to wife and child, until the tedium of lying low and sleeping with one woman sends him once again into the fast lane. Pretty Boy reveals a melodramatic inner life in sentimental passages, pining for home and hearth, pondering fate ("I am swept along by time and fortune") and spouting bad haiku ("Horses laugh somewhere in the night"). Fortunately, the author usually returns to robberies and brothels quickly enough to keep the bullet-riddled, perfume-scented plot moving briskly.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0765304732
• ISBN 13: 9780765304735
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352