Richard and Margaret Whittemore.Photo: getty (2)
One look at popular podcasts and Netflix shows tells you that true crime is hot these days. But a new book shows that’s been true for a century — and traces the genre’s origins to an outlaw couple whose daring heists, violence and sex appeal captured the nation’s imagination in the 1920s.
Glenn Stout’sTiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America’s Original Gangster Couple(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27), chronicles the exploits of Richard and Margaret Whittemore, a husband and wife who ran a crew responsible for jewel thefts totaling millions in today’s dollars that left a trail of dead bodies. Before Bonnie and Clyde gained fame during the Depression Era, the Whittemores — and the press who breathlessly covered them — established the archetype of the seductive bad boy and his loyal gun moll.
In an era when crime investigation was rudimentary — crooks could change names easily, and fingerprinting was just coming into use — the Whittemore gang operated with impunity for about a year. All the while, public interest in their crimes gained momentum. Their heists were shocking in their brazenness and violence; it helped that they were good-looking.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
In this context, he writes, they were “real-life antiheroes the public would find both repulsive and irresistible, a coupling impossible to embrace but also impossible to ignore, one the culture has both celebrated and exploited ever since.”
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Their cultural footprint, though largely forgotten, was immense: For about six months in 1925 and 1926, they were on the front pages of newspapers coast to coast. In an email to PEOPLE, Stout wrote they were “as famous as any two people could possibly be, celebrities as well-known then asKanye WestandKim Kardashianare today.”
Stout notes that their crime spree inspired the genre of gangster films that proliferated a few years later. Many of the journalists who covered the Whittemores became screenwriters and producers of these films. The template of the gangster and the gun moll was replicated throughout that era and remains a cultural touchstone to this day.
Saorla Stout.courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Stout, a former librarian and a veteran author, has written many books on sports history includingThe Selling of the Babein 2016, which chronicles how the New York Yankees fleeced the Boston Red Sox to acquire Babe Ruth. InTiger Girl and the Candy Kid, Stout makes extensive use of his research skills, never more so than in the suspenseful recreations of the gang’s robberies, which he renders in meticulous detail.
He says he was able to avail himself of the era’s saturation of newspapers, which put out multiple editions per day.
“For some crimes I had more than a dozen separate written accounts to work with,” he wrote in an email. “Each one gives you something unique, and merging the facts and information from all of them in combination enabled me to create a cinematic portrait. One story might mention the make of the getaway car. Another the caliber of the guns. Another how the victims were dressed and reacted. Another what the Candy Kid said.”
The result of all that research is an edge-of-your-seat true crime thriller that doubles as a fascinating cultural history.
“What a time to be alive,” Stout writes in the book. “And what a time to die.”
Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America’s Original Gangster Couple(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27) is currently on sale.
source: people.com
