Handsome Harry: A Novel [Hardcover]

James Carlos Blake (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2004

They were die-hard and deadly partners who made national headlines with their daring bank holdups and gun battles -- and they had a lot of laughs while they were at it. They were known as the Dillinger Gang, but at its heart was "Handsome Harry" Pierpont -- tough, fearless, intelligent, and sworn to live by no law but his own.

Presented as his intimate "confessions," Harry's story takes us from his teenage days as a small-time crook to the pinnacle of his notoriety to his final hours in the penitentiary death house.

In prison, young Harry meets equally young John Dillinger, and they form an unassailable friendship. After John is paroled he helps Harry pull off one of the most infamous prison escapes in U.S. history. Then John is jailed and Harry must in turn liberate him; but the jailbreak comes at a tragic cost and ultimately seals Harry's fate.

In four blazing months of freedom before he meets that fate, Harry and John and their three steadfast partners -- Red, Russell, and Fat Charley -- establish themselves as the most legendary outlaw gang of the twentieth century. They rob banks. Shoot it out with police and federal agents and rival gangs. Make harrowing getaways. And all the while -- from the Midwest to Florida to Arizona, and in the company of their bold and memorable women -- they have a grand time of it.

Crafted in James Carlos Blake's signature style of fast-paced violence, sizzling sex, and darkly raucous humor, Handsome Harry brings to life a thrilling chapter from the chronicles of American crime.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blake's eighth novel, like his recent Under the Skin (2003), stars an antihero narrator in a world of Depression-era crime. As Harry Pierpont, the self-described leader of the bank-robbing Dillinger Gang, awaits electrocution in Ohio for the murder of a sheriff, he recalls his adventures in a narrative that reads like a good as-told-to true crime story. His teenage criminal apprenticeship prepares him for a career as an "independent fundraiser," aka a stick-up man. With his friend Earl Northern, he holds up his first bank at 21; when their second heist goes awry, Harry ends up in the state reformatory, where he first meets John Dillinger. An escape attempt lands him in the Michigan City, Ind., state pen, and there Harry learns the systematized approach to bank robbery his gang will employ years later after Dillinger helps them escape. The heady account of the ensuing four-month crime spree has the gang taking down banks, buying new cars, mooning over women and shooting policemen in the face. Harry's voice is the smooth, almost affectless vernacular of a hardened con it's convincing, but it also keep readers at a certain distance. Add that to Harry's exhibited brutality, pitilessness and fixation on sex (the book has a lot of erections and much is made of the relative size of John and Harry's members), and Blake has created a deeply flawed character, eloquent enough to tell his tale but perhaps not perceptive enough to understand its significance. Fans of true crime and gangster stories will undoubtedly enjoy this "ripped from the history books" adventure as seen through Harry's lens of tough verisimilitude.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Butch, Sundance, Bonnie, and Clyde shot their way to the top of the antihero cinema heap in the 1970s with stories as celebratory as they were melancholic. This energetic tale, loosely based on the life and times of the Depression-era heist gang headed by "Handsome" Harry Pierpont and John Dillinger, is of a piece with those wonderful bank-robber hagiographies. But here in the authority-revering twenty-first century, the cultural moment may be past for sympathizing with good-timing thugs all too willing to gun down a sheriff as he sits at his desk chatting with his wife. Giving the story more thematic heft might have saved it from seeming as anachronistic as its subjects. But taken simply as a breezy, blood-soaked tip of the fedora to simpler times, the novel cooks harder than sly narrator Pierpont does when he meets his inevitable appointment with Old Sparky after a four-month spree that left the Midwest agog. Ably squeezing the last drop of juice from a familiar outlaw narrative, Blake brings this gin-soaked era roaring back to life. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1 edition (February 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060554789
• ISBN-13: 978-0060554781
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,148,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new voice for a distinctive writer, February 3, 2004

By 

Ron Franscell, Author of 'Sourtoe Cocktail Club' - See all my reviews

This review is from: Handsome Harry: A Novel (Hardcover)

Ever notice how mug shots these days never capture that special twinkle in a suspect's eye? Just ask Michael Jackson, Nick Nolte and James Brown.

Well, it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time in America, police photos were almost glamorous. In fact, a star-struck small-town sheriff once posed with a beaming John Dillinger as if they were two frat boys at a college reunion. A good-looking criminal was a celebrity.

Now James Carlos Blake tells their story through the eyes of one of the most charming and charismatic -- and least known -- of the Depression-era gangsters: "Handsome" Harry Pierpont.

Blake's eight novel is a brilliant portrait of the real-life Pierpont, Dillinger`s bank-robbing partner, and other not-so-famous bandits who almost made bank robbery, gun molls and Tommy guns fashionable. The time, place and people all come alive through Blake.

Told by Pierpont himself on the night before his 1934 execution, the novel has an appealing intimacy. Blake captures the outlaw cant perfectly, from psychopathic narcissism to jailhouse bravado to paranoid remorselessness. In short, the gutsy Blake mimics a true criminal marvelously while telling an alluring story.

Some of the myths are woven into Harry's tale, and some are only made delightfully more mysterious. For example, there's Dillinger's legendary, um, physical endowment -- a story that arises from a famous morgue photo which shows an enormous protuberance under the bandit's death-sheet. Pierpont's story? He claims to be even more gifted than his partner in crime, which is why he was also nicknamed "Pete." Ah, the mythology is safe a while longer.

"Handsome Harry" is not a departure for the seductively violent Blake, but a refinement. It still carries his trademark carnage, redolent sex and dry humor, but it is also a beguiling, hurtling digression into a new voice for Blake. It's not just first-person point-of-view, but it's crawling inside a character who really lived and re-building him from the inside out without disturbing the patina of legend that colors him. And it's all jake.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Trip to Hell, August 31, 2004

By 

Carl Hoffman (Cleveland Heights,, OH United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Handsome Harry: A Novel (Hardcover)

I've been reading true crime books about Dillinger for the last quarter century, and I've always thought Pierpont was an interesting cipher, an important component of the Dillinger story who was never well explained by any of the "histories" (the foremost of which is THE DILLINGER DAYS by John Toland). But Blake solves all that with this portrait of a sociopath who wants to rise above the run of humanity by showing he's tougher/more ruthless than anybody. It's very believable, and I was highly impressed with Blake's research, also the skillful way he wove it into an authentic voice and narrative. He answers every question I ever had about Pierpont, for instance, why all the histories use the exact same mug shot as illustration. HANDSOME HARRY mentions that Pierpont always stuck out his tongue, closed his eyes, or made a face in his other photos, to show his contempt for the cops who were taking them; the one in the history books only shows him scowling, which must make it the best of the lot. Blake also asserts that every major incident and character is based on real events and people--and he made me believe it. (The shootout I hadn't heard of was the one between Pierpont and Dillinger and the St. Louis gang they had ripped off, in the parking lot of a Chicago night club; I'd like to know more about that.) I was also amazed at the amount of mayhem the gang managed to perpetrate in just four months. I knew they had done all this, but reading it again made it amazing.

On the other hand, the four-month lifespan of the gang points to why I found the book rather unpleasant. Pierpont sacrificies everything, including his own life, for that four-month spree. He's a man who was born to be electrocuted. In Christian terms, he is not only going to Hell as an unrepentant murderer, he has lived all his adult life in a Hell of his own creation. And he LIKES it! The violent, remorseless protagonist of this book is highly disturbing, which is why I'm giving it four stars rather than five.

At the same time, it's a fast read, and very skillfully written.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vintage James Carlos Blake, June 1, 2004

By 

Lawrence A. Strid (Mission Viejo, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Handsome Harry: A Novel (Hardcover)

This author specializes in creating historical fiction that is based upon real life characters, who are historically regarded as outlaws but in their own time would have been viewed by many of the contemporary populace as heroes. Blake's work is always meticulously researched, with the resulting work, while technically fiction, usually mirroring very closely the actual historical events and characters that the book is based upon. This latest work is about Harry Pierpont, who was at the centerpoint of John Dillinger's first gang. His second gang, which featured Baby Face Nelson and Homer Van Meter and who were involved at the Little Bohemia shoot-out in Wisconsin, usually carry the greater attention in historical replay. Blake does a wondrous job in creating the atmosphere of this Depression-era story of a time when many of Pierpont's ilk where seen as crusaders against a corrupt banking and big business industry that had created the Depression and brought ruin to so many. I would have given this book 5 stars, except it didn't quite match up to his two best works, those being "Wildwood Boys" and "Red Grass River", both of which are also strongly recommended. I can't wait for his novels to come out, they are like time machines to grittier times when a sense of moral conviction born out of oppression and the use of a gun made the bad guys believe (and with at least some justification) that they were victims and were really the good guys. Anything this man puts out is superlative and is highly recommended.