Jeff P. Jones was born and raised in Denver, Colorado. His paternal ancestors were sharecroppers in East Texas. He’s a MacDowell Fellow, and his fiction has won several awards, including the A. David Schwartz, Hackney, Wabash, and Meridian Editors’ prizes. He lives on the Palouse in northern Idaho. This is his first book.

John Boessenecker, a San Francisco trial lawyer and former police officer, is considered one of the leading authorities on crime and law enforcement in the Old West. He is the award-winning author of eight books, including Bandido: The Life and Times of Tiburcio Vasquez and When Law Was in the Holster: The Frontier Life of Bob Paul. In 2011 and 2013, True West magazine named Boessenecker Best Nonfiction Writer. He has appeared frequently as a historical commentator on PBS, The History Channel, A&E, and other networks.

HISTORICAL FICTION

Jeff P. Jones

Love Give Us One Death: Bonnie and Clyde in the Last Days

Winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize

Texas Review Press

Paperback, 978-1-68003-097-6, 384 pages, $18.95

October 25, 2016

BIOGRAPHY

John Boessenecker

Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde

Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin’s Press)

Hardcover, 978-1-250-06998-6, 528 pages, $29.99 (also available in paperback and ebook); April 2016

Reviewed by Si Dunn

Two noteworthy new books offer widely differing perspectives on the final days and violent deaths of outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in 1934. And they create an enlightening synergy when read in sequence.

Love Give Us One Death is built around an intriguing mix of experimental fiction, historical accounts, court testimonies, witness statements, shifting viewpoints, photographs, song lyrics and poetry. The novel, Jeff P. Jones’s first book, takes us inside the relationship between Bonnie and Clyde and stays in their minds, at least briefly, even after they die.

Texas Ranger, meanwhile, is a solidly researched, well-written and mostly sympathetic biography of Frank Hamer (pronounced “Hay-mer”). He is credited with leading the manhunt that eventually tracked down and killed Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana. Six law enforcement officers, including Hamer, took part in the May, 1934, crossfire ambush on a rural road. Within seconds, the bandits’ “death car” was riddled with 167 bullet holes, plus numerous buckshot punctures.

So some readers may quibble with part of the subtitle chosen for this ninth book by veteran biographer and writer John Boessenecker: “The Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde.” Who exactly killed whom cannot be so clearly defined, since the fugitives’ bodies were pierced by fusillades from automatic weapons, rifles, shotguns, and pistols.

Boessenecker’s book tracks Frank Hamer’s life from his birth in 1884 in the Texas Hill Country to his enlistment in the Texas Rangers in 1906 and then throughout his long, storied, and often controversial career. Hamer held various positions in law enforcement until late in life and died in 1955.

As a youth, Hamer often had left his overcrowded home and headed alone into the nearby hills. “He took only his rifle, fishing gear, and bowie knife, exploring and living off the land,” Boessenecker writes. Hamer often would stay gone for as long as six weeks. The author adds: “It was on his boyhood journeys that Frank Hamer became a dead shot. Money was scarce and ammunition expensive, so he learned to hit what he shot at.”

This marksmanship became a key part of his reputation as a lawman both feared and respected as he battled lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan, moonshiners, organized crime and assorted robbers and murderers.

At the time of the Bonnie and Clyde ambush, however, Hamer recently had been between jobs. The Texas Ranger force had been fired by Governor “Ma” Ferguson and replaced “with political hacks.” Hamer tried unsuccessfully to get a U.S. marshal’s appointment. Suddenly, in February, 1934, the Texas Prison System’s superintendent had a proposal: Could Hamer track down and kill Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker?

Hamer became a special investigator for the Texas Highway Patrol, and his verbal orders were to “put them [Bonnie and Clyde] on the spot, know you are right—and then shoot everyone in sight,” Boessenecker recounts.

In Love Give Us One Death, Jones handles the ambush scene with artful smoothness, changing viewpoints between Bonnie and one of the six lawmen, Ted Hinton. Then, Hamer punctuates the killings by putting “five shots through the window into her back.”

How does Jones describe the unusual approach he followed to explain Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship and final days? “In one sense,” he writes in his afterword, “ the best I can say is that this is my own error-riddled version of history, for, when it seemed necessary, I’ve added, subtracted, and distorted” within a work of fiction. “But, in another sense, it has been my aim to draw as close as possible to the actual Bonnie and Clyde because doing so deepens the emotional connection. To change a story effectively, the teller must first know it intimately, and with dates and well-documented events, I’ve held this telling as close as possible to the known facts.”

John Boessenecker, meanwhile, grew up fascinated by Bonnie and Clyde and was well aware that Frank Hamer was the villain in the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde. He held that negative view of the Texas lawman until he read a book titled I’m Frank Hamer and began changing his opinion. “As the years passed, I realized that an in-depth biography of Frank Hamer was long overdue.”

The ambush of Bonnie and Clyde happened eighty-two years ago. Yet these new books bring fresh views of the two psychopathic killers who made many escapes and took many lives. And both works spotlight the Texas lawman who finally made it possible to give them frontier justice.

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