Try hard for a moment to imagine the United States of 1933. Immersed in the midst of a great depression, the unemployment rate was over 20%. In the Midwest the banks that had survived the financial calamity were in trouble and demonized for repossessing farms left and right. Class warfare was at its probable peak and a new mythos was in the making for the working poor. People like Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Alvin Karpis, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, and Baby Face Nelson were capitalizing on strong unrest among the nation’s underclass and anti-government and institutional sentiment and finding themselves folk heroes—taking back from the banks what the banks had taken away from ordinary people.

On June 17th of that year, career bank robber and Fort Leavenworth escapee Frank Nash was in Kansas City's Union Station after his apprehension in Hot Springs, Arkansas the night before, when two, possibly three, men armed with submachine guns, attempting to free him sparked the event that came to be known as The Kansas City Massacre. In under a minute, three police officers, a federal agent and Nash himself were dead, the gunmen disappearing empty-handed.

The brazenness of the assault left President Franklin Roosevelt little choice, but to organize the nation’s first federal police force to wage the “War on Crime.” At the time criminals held almost every tactical advantage over their small town, law enforcement counterparts—fruit of the industrial revolution like Browning Automatics and Thompson machine guns that they stole from National Guard depots and even police stations, meant they could outgun local police forces while bulletproof vests and V-8 engines aided getaways that uniformly ended at the state or even county lines.

That summer, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was born.

Some of these criminals, (like Dillinger), played the PR game exceptionally well, and kept up public support even as body counts climbed. Others found kidnapping wealthy or prominent citizens for ransom to be more lucrative than sticking up banks, though public support was far less for such tactics.

Infamous, the new historical novel by Ace Atkins weaves the story of the abduction of Oklahoma oil man Charles Urschel by Machine Gun Kelly in July 1933, the hostage and ransom drama, the marriage and manipulations of George and Kathryn, (who anointed her husband “Machine Gun” in a savvy promotional move) as well as the the FBI's infancy into a fascinating tapestry of our not too distant past.

Atkins' recent work finds its roots in real crimes of America's early twentieth century and belongs alongside other historical crime novelists like James Ellroy's American Tabloid and Dennis Lehane's The Given Day on your shelf. Gotta check him out.

Plus, his name is Ace. That's gotta count for something.

Any other recommendations for novels focused on early twentieth century criminals and crimes worth checking out?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.