Beguiling Outlaw Lies

By John Skow

Larry McMurtry's splendid horse opera Lonesome Dove was a marvel of nostalgic bosh, and that same rare gift for making heroic tales from small-town street sweepings is on view in his new novel. Pretty Boy Floyd (Simon & Schuster; 444 pages; $24), written with McMurtry's screenwriting partner, Diana Ossana, is a lesser story, loosely tethered to the life and death of the renowned badman Charles Arthur Floyd (1904-34). But like Lonesome Dove, it beguiles the reader with a golden haze of lovely lies.

The setting is the deep Midwest -- rural Oklahoma and Kansas, mostly -- in the period before and during the Great Depression. The lies are rascally old friends: that bandits are decent, doomed boys; that bullets don't really hurt; and, of course, that whores have hearts of gold. Charley Floyd has served four years in the Jefferson City, Missouri, lockup for robbing an armored car, but his career really gets going when he and a rodeo cowboy named George Birdwell both try, by storyteller's coincidence, to rob the Earlsboro, Oklahoma, bank at the same time. Meeting cute is what Hollywood calls this: "'Sir, I was here first -- had my gun out before you even got to the teller's window,' the cowboy pointed out. 'That was 'cause I was polite and held the door for you,' Charley reminded him."

Somehow the authors get us to swallow this nonsense. Floyd and Birdwell team up, naturally, and become regional Robin Hoods. There isn't much to the story -- flivvers and floozies, irate wives and an occasional perforated lawman, plus a misty death scene for each of the heroes. The novel's true subject, to the lighthearted extent that it has one, is mythology itself. With the headline-hungry FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover promoting Floyd to No. 2 and then No. 1 on his new invention, the Most Wanted List, Charley's life becomes a legend before he is finished living it.