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the two best books on Bonnie and Clyde, told by Clyde’s sister and Bonnie’s mother.)

Peterson, Virgil W. Barbarians in Our Midst. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

Phillips, John Neal. Running with Bonnie and Clyde: The Ten Fast Years of Ralph Fults. Norman,

Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. (Excellent book, much of it told by Clyde’s

onetime partner Ralph Fults.)

Potter, Claire Bond. War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998. (Outstanding academic analysis of the War on Crime period.)

Poulsen, Ellen. Don’t Call Us Molls: Women of the John Dillinger Gang. Little Neck, N.Y.: Clinton

Cook Publishing, 2002.

Powers, Richard Gid. G-Men: Hoover’s FBI in American Popular Culture. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

———. Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Free Press, 1987.

Purvis, Melvin. American Agent. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936.

Quimby, Myron. The Devil’s Emissaries. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969.

Reddig, William M. Tom’s Town: Kansas City and the Pendergast Legend. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott,

1947.

Ruth, David E. Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918-1934. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Sanborn, Debra. The Barrow Gang’s Visit to Dexter. Dexter, Iowa: Bob Weesner, 1976.

Simmons, Lee. Assignment Huntsville: Memoirs of a Texas Prison Officer. Austin, Tex.: University

of Texas, 1957.

Steele, Phillip W., with Marie Barrow Scoma. The Family Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Gretna, La.: Pelican, 2000.

Sullivan, William, with Bill Brown. The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.

Summers, Anthony. Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1993.

Swierczynski, Duane. This Here’s a Stick-Up: The Big Bad Book of American Bank Robbery. Indianapolis,

Ind.: Alpha Books, 2002.

Toland, John. Dillinger Days. New York: Random House, 1963.

Touhy, Roger, with Ray Brennan. The Stolen Years. Cleveland, Ohio: Pennington, 1959.

Treherne, John. The Strange History of Bonnie and Clyde. New York: Stein & Day, 1984.

Unger, Robert. The Union Station Massacre: The Original Sin of Hoover’s FBI. Kansas City, Mo.:

Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1997. (Definitive.)

Wallis, Michael. The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. (Excellent

biography, with full cooperation of Floyd family.)

Watkins, T. H. The Great Depression: America in the 1930s. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

———. The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America. New York:

Henry Holt, 1999.

Webb, Walter Prescott. The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935.

Whitehead, Don. The FBI Story: A Report to the People. New York: Random House, 1956.

Winter, Robert. Mean Men: The Sons of Ma Barker. Danbury, Conn.: Rutledge Books, 2000.

(Unusual if well-researched book on the Barker family in the pre-War on Crime period.)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For forty years much of the new material uncovered on the War on Crime period has been unearthed by a dedicated band of amateur historians, many of whom provided tremendous help to me during my four years of research. Probably no one person has amassed more information on Depression-era outlaws than Rick Mattix of Bussey, Iowa, who opened his files to me and was always there to answer a thorny question. Thomas Smusyn, who knows more about John Dillinger than any man alive, was an expert guide through Dillinger’s old Chicago haunts.

I am deeply indebted to Paul Maccabee, whose history of the St. Paul underworld, John Dillinger Slept Here, is one of the finest books produced on the War on Crime period; to Robert Unger, who knows more about the Kansas City Massacre than anyone; to Bill Helmer, the dean of Dillinger historians; to Bob Bates in Oregon; to Curt Gentry, whose J. Edgar Hoover biography remains the finest in or out of print; and to Richard Jones in Oklahoma City, who allowed