Pretty Boy Floyd

by Larry McMurtry

The time is 1925. The place, St. Louis, Missouri. Charley Floyd, a good-looking, sweet-smiling country boy from Oklahoma working as a baker's helper at the Kroger Bakery, has just taken the big step that will make him, very shortly, a legend in his own lifetime: he has just robbed his first armored car. Charley is an irresistible invention, as American as Huck Finn, a young man so charming that it's hard not to like him, even as he's robbing you at gunpoint. The women in his life - his tough-talking mentor and lover, Ma Ash (an older woman who recognizes just where Charley is headed, but can't stop him), his long-suffering, loyal wife, Ruby, his equally loyal girlfriend, Beulah, his mother, Mamie, and a good many more - are as charmed by him as the hill people of the Ozarks, who hide him out when he's on the run from the law. The only people who aren't charmed by Charley are the federal agents tracking him down, particularly his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, who sees in Pretty Boy Floyd a