Then she met Clyde, well-dressed but not tall or particularly handsome, someone who “liked making all the decisions.” Petite, feisty Bonnie fell immediately in love and the attraction was mutual. Before they met at a party on January 5, 1930, Bonnie was unemployed and hoping for fame and glory as a poet, or as a Broadway starlet. Guinn’s superior investigation of his subject, focused through an objective lens, blends almost seamlessly with skillful pacing and appropriately placed tension–storytelling at its best.Ĭlyde and Bonnie were both from the wrong side of the tracks in Dallas: poor, uneducated and trying to survive, along with their extended families, the devastation of the Depression years.

This meticulously researched and cleanly written narrative, which draws upon family memoirs, letters, diaries, historical documents, interviews and the most definitive books done by Barrow historians to date, effectively strips away the romantic fancies fed to the American public about Bonnie and Clyde over the last 75 years, especially those in the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Claus, now takes on a more nitty-gritty topic: the desperate, violent and short lives of Bonnie and Clyde. The title of investigative journalist Jeff Guinn’s latest book, Go Down Together, is taken from one of Parker’s poems, the haunting “The End of the Line,” in which she predicts death at the hands of “the laws.” Guinn, who has previously written fictional musings about Santa and Mrs. Bonnie Parker, gun-toting girlfriend of trigger-happy Clyde Barrow, didn’t smoke cigars she wrote poetry.

Go Down Together by Jeff Guinn