- Mass Market Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: Pocket Books; Reprint edition (31 Dec 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0671891677
- ISBN-13: 978-0671891671
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 10.9 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,279,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
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 way of making his Bureau of Investigation famous. Written in collaboration by Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, and his screen-writing partner, Diana Ossana, Pretty Boy Floyd, soon to be a major motion picture, is as fast-paced as Charley Floyd's own career, which takes him from small-time robbery to national notoriety in a roller-coaster ride of bank heists, love affairs, shootings, and newspaper headlines that exemplifies both the celebrity hunger of the Depression era and the glamour that surrounded - and inevitably destroyed - young men like Charley Floyd, who chose, for the most part out of boredom with rural life, the outlaw trail. Set in the heart of America, PrettyBoy Floyd is at once a richly comic masterpiece and a kind of American tragedy about the price of fame the corruption of innocence, and the fatal consequences of becoming, however unwittingly, a hero. A major work of fiction, as profoundly American in its own way as McMurtry's o
About the Author
McMurtry has published 21 novels (the best-known listed above). He also operates antiquarian bookshops in Washington DC, Texas and Arizona.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Apparently written along with the film script and it shows. The narrative serves merely to fill the spaces between dialogue and is uninvolving. The characterisation is slight and the writers fail to make us care what happens to the protagonist. I have read other of Larry McMurty's work and this one falls short by a significant margin... I suppose how you rate the result would depend on your expectations. As a genre fiction it is OK but it isn't the literature we associate with McMurty.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
24 reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
FUNNY AND SAD...AND HIGHLY ENTERTAINING READ!!!
9 Aug 2005
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I don't understand the review by the (supposed) professor...because I don't think he understood this is a work of FICTION. Though it's loosely based upon an historical outlaw, it is a story told by FICTION WRITERS. It was funny, sad, full of colorful, clever, original dialogue, that made me feel as if I knew these characters inside and out. Pretty Boy was considered a folk hero in the late twenties and thirties, professor sir. Read the novel in that context. I think that was the point of the authors--that this was a time and place they wanted to capture with their imaginations, to bring to life for those of us who weren't alive then (and to entertain those who were). It was a rough time, people were poor, hungry, the banks were the enemy because they put entire families out on the streets, with nothing. There was no welfare, no homeless shelters. It was a wild, rough time. I gave this book to my grandpa (a fine, upstanding man if there ever was one), who remembered Pretty Boy Floyd from his own childhood, and he LOVED it!!! If anything, this novel, by the end, shows us how a wrong turn in the road of life can change the course of our entire future...and how hard it is to ever go back...give it a chance, I don't think you'll be disappointed!!!!!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Thanks, Diana and Larry
10 July 2006
Format:Mass Market Paperback
What a breath of fresh air. From the opening scene I was back in McMurtry country (language-wise) - an easy flowing style that is comforting and hypnotic.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Sorry, Larry....you're much better as a solo act
20 Feb 1999
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Since Larry McMurtry was listed as one of the authors of this book, I picked it up and thought I would enjoy it. Boy, was I ever wrong. "Lonesome Dove" was a masterpiece, and so are the other McMurtry books I've read - but this, by comparison, is amateur night. The writing is stiff and reads like something McMurtry might have written when he was just starting out - and then threw in the trash.
Forgive me, Mr. McMurtry, but you're much better as a solo act, and I'm only sorry that you're not going to write any more novels about that wonderful pair, Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call.
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