The daring movie revolutionized Hollywood; Now the true story of Bonnie and Clyde is told in the lovers’ own voices, with verisimilitude and drama to match Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. By means of extensive archival research, declassified FBI documents, and interviews, Paul Schneider has written a book that is strictly nonfiction—no dialogue or other material has been made up—and set in the dirt-poor Texas landscape that spawned the star-crossed outlaws. The dramatically crafted tale begins with a daring jailbreak and ends with an ambush and shoot-out that consigns their bullet-riddled bodies to the crumpled front seat of a hopped-up getaway car. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow’s relationship was, at the core, a toxic combination of infatuation blended with an instinct for going too far too fast. The poetry-writing petite Bonnie and her gun-crazy lover drove lawmen wild. Despite their best efforts the duo kept up their exploits, slipping the noose every time. That is until the weight of their infamy in four states caught up with them in the famous ambush that literally blasted away their years of live-action rampage in seconds. Without glamorizing the killers or vilifying the cops, the book, alive with action and high-level entertainment, provides a complete picture of America’s most famous outlaw couple and the culture that created them.
"A nonfiction novel in the style of Capote's In Cold Blood . . . . Schneider's Bonnie and Clyde presents the story the way it might have been from the inside."—Allen Barra, Chicago Tribune
"Schneider gets much closer to his subjects in Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend. Noted for his novelistic approach to nonfiction in such previous works as Brutal Journey, Schneider takes two big risks here. He writes throughout in the present tense and tells much of the story from Clyde's point of view in a startling second-person narrative: 'You're just shooting the trees to pieces over the guard's heads with your Browning automatic rifle— . . . God, that gun feels good. Rata rata rat.' This strategy makes Schneider's book extraordinarily immediate, not to mention lurid. Liberally quoting from eyewitness accounts (of varying reliability, he freely acknowledges in the endnotes), he excels at conveying the grungy texture of their lives."—Wendy Smith, Los Angeles Times
"A detailed history of the Barrow gang's short life . . . Bonnie and Clyde has extensive quotes to pull the reader into the action."—Simon Baatz, The Washington Post
"Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend by Paul Schneider is the best thing I’ve read this year—it puts truer faces on the duo than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s, and while taking nothing away from the immortal, classic film, adds layer upon layer of intrigue . . . Paul Schneider, 75 years after the couple was ripped to shreds by the bullets of the law, has stripped away the iconography, offering up a stunningly researched, immaculately constructed story of love, sex and sin, all in the words of Bonnie and Clyde and those who knew them, feared them, and had the misfortune of being caught in the cross-fire. As Schneider explains in his intro to the text, 'The following is a work of nonfiction in which nothing has been created out of whole cloth by the author and everything has a reasonably acceptable pedigree as a "fact."' Then, he adds, with a touch of humor, 'That said, some sources are better than others, a situation that is true for every work of nonfiction and is even more unavoidable in stories as rife with rumor and lacquered with legend as that of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow—all the reader needs to know is that no dialogue has been made up' . . . Schneider takes the “cool” away, and shows Bonnie and Clyde for what they were: lovers, laughers, and cold-blooded murderers. His Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend is a riveting triumph, and as eye-opening as the sight of Barrow’s corpse. They changed American culture, and died in the act, and for that, we’ll never forget them—whether we’d like to or not."—Christopher Schobert, The Buffalo News
"If an amusement park spent millions on a Bonnie and Clyde adventure extravaganza, you would not get a more thrilling ride than might be had by reading West Tisbury resident Paul Schneider's latest book, Bonnie and Clyde, the Lives Behind the Legend . . . Mr. Schneider (The Adirondacks, The Enduring Shore, and Brutal Journey) conjures a very palatable desperation as well as the excitement of life on the run—a life with a limited future. His deft delivery will have the reader sweating along with Clyde and his gang, feeling the hunger, desolation, exhaustion, and the camaraderie among thieves. The story is like a Greek tragedy. There are no surprise endings in traditional Greek tragedy, and no surprise endings in Bonnie and Clyde. (Most of us have seen the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.) But it is not the end, but the journey that makes this book worth reading . . . Almost immediately, Mr. Schneider sets the stage and mood with his mastery of descriptive prose. He moves between a narrative that at times seems to mimic those 1930 movie narrators—part third person omniscient vernacular, and an unusual second person omniscient voice that somehow puts you in the center of all the activity. Perhaps the most unusual and impressive aspect of this book is that every quoted personal conversation is comprised of words that were actually spoken or written about or by the people doing the talking. These quotes are referenced in 343 citations at the end of the book. Mr. Schneider's ability to rehash and synthesize massive quantities of data into an absorbing read is nothing short of masterful. Paul Schneider has written another winner. It may be his best book yet."—Tony Omer, The Martha's Vineyard Times "When David Newman and I were writing the screen play for Bonnie and Clyde we did an enormous amount of research, but not nearly as much as Paul Schneider. And it has paid off handsomely; he has written a splendid biography of two iconic American gangsters who were 'not only outlaws, but outcasts.' From the first page, waiting for a prison break on a foggy morning in East Texas, to the last, the book is riveting and unforgettable."—Robert Benton"Fast-paced account of the fast-lived lives of Mr. Barrow and Ms. Parker. In Arthur Penn's 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, Faye Dunaway was a fine fit for Bonnie, who, said one eyewitness, 'could turn heads.' Schneider is inclined to a touch more noirish poetry, describing the young Dallas waitress as looking 'like a piece of candy . . . dressed in a funny uniform with enormous lapels, like some cross between a French maid and Raggedy Anne, and she's barely taller than the big brass cash register on the counter.' But Warren Beatty? Well, Clyde Barrow wasn't the king stud of the Texas bad guys—that honor went to a contemporary aptly named 'Dapper Dan'—but rather a thin drink of water, albeit with a very bad attitude and a solid record of standing tall before judges. Schneider takes some risk in attempting to put himself into the heads of Bonnie, Clyde and assorted criminals and lawmen. But, as he points out in a note on sources, the story has been well covered before by numerous contemporaries of the Depression-era dastardly duo, so that there are plenty of primary sources to back up his claims. Schneider does a righteous job of understanding Bonnie and Clyde, and if they're not wholly sympathetic—they did kill folks, after all—they're not wholly monstrous either. Thanks to Penn's film, there are plenty of people who have some sense of how they lived and died—spectacularly, and without much regard for the messes they left behind. Schneider shows how oddly accurate the film got at least those final moments, all rat-a-tat machine guns and chirping cicadas. A pleasure for true-crime buffs and a better read than Jeff Guinn's Go Down Together."—Kirkus Reviews"Almost 75 years ago, the four-year murder and robbery spree of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow ended in a hail of bullets on a desolate Louisiana road. During those four years, the Barrow Gang held up a few banks, knocked over numerous grocery stores, killed several police officers, and successfully cast themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods struggling against an unjust social order. This work strives . . . to strip away the sensationalism and view the couple and their exploits accurately. More lyrical than Jeff Guinn in Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, Schneider uses the words and even thoughts of key players to tell their story. He eloquently describes the bleak, Depression-era environment that helped spawn Bonnie and Clyde and made the public willing to accept a pair of damaged souls as romantic figures. For both crime aficionados and general readers with an interest in the era, this book is of great value."—Jay Freeman, Booklist
Paul Schneider is the author of the critically acclaimed Brutal Journey, the highly praised The Enduring Shore, and The Adirondacks, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. He and his wife, the photographer Nina Bramhall, and their son, Nathaniel, divide their time between Bradenton, Florida, and West Tisbury, Massachusetts.
CHAPTER 1
EASTHAM
Fog rolls off the Trinity River in East Texas in the hours before dawn, especially in winter, and lies on the land like Vaseline. It’s thick and calm and quiet and peaceful in the fog, there where the piney woods that stretch on east into Louisiana give way somewhat abruptly to blackland prairies that spread west all the way to Dallas and beyond. She almost can’t see her hand held out of the open car door in front of her own face.
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