Decades in the making, On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde is a fast moving and gut-wrenching, highly original exploration into the personalities of the star-crossed lovers and “public enemies” Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. A thoroughly researched, in-depth study of the true natures of these notorious outlaws, by an acclaimed author well versed in the dark fields of violence, On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde breaks away from the usual police-blotter procedurals on these outlaw lovers. Delving deep into their character in his unique and uncompromising style, Gilmore places the reader squarely inside a stolen 1932 V-8 with the desperadoes on a dusty, two-year, devil-take-the-high-road spree of robberies, shoot-outs and murder. Through the dark windshield of legend, the short lives of these outlaw desperadoes on a relentless ride to an infamous end-in a torrent of blood and bullets-emerges as an essential and compelling narrative of these undying icons of American crime lore. On the Run With Bonnie & Clyde includes a controversial critical perspective of the unlawful ambush murder of Bonnie Parker, who was never officially accused of a violent crime. Heavily illustrated with photos from the author’s collection.

 

“The most exciting, peeling-away of the human layers of two of the most infamous crime figures in American history . . . For the first time, we are truly taken inside these notorious characters.” – Lawrence Grobel, Biographer

“John Gilmore is one of America’s natural-born gifts to literature.” – Gary Indiana

A Road with No End, From a Forward to John Gilmore’s “On the Run with Bonnie & Clyde”  by Marshall Terrill, author of a dozen successful books, most notably Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel.

The bogeyman really does exist and his name is John Gilmore.  How many writers today can you really say are a bad ass?  John Gilmore doesn’t know this, but he’s my favorite writer.  He has been ever since I cracked open his book, Laid Bare, which is the best Hollywood memoir I’ve ever read.  It’s not one of those “warts and all” type books – John splayed open his soul and put it out there for all to see.  He writes about the carnality of Tinseltown; the Boulevard of Broken dreams; those trampled underfoot.  Gilmore specializes in imploding Hollywood myths, and that, in my estimation, makes him dangerous.  How many writers can you think of who are dangerous?  So when John’s published asked me to write a foreword, naturally, I was thrilled.  John is, in my humble opinion, the most talented noir/true crime writer on the scene today.  No one even comes close. Forget James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Joseph Wambaugh or Sue Grafton.  Oh sure, they write about murder-mystery and blood and guts and gore, but they do it from the confines of their million-dollar mansions and plush home offices.  John Gilmore prefers working on his own terms—in the trenches, down and dirty, sleeves rolled up, often moving to locales where the story takes place.  In my humble opinion, he’s the most talented noir/true crime writer on the scene today—no one even comes close.  He’s my favorite writer and has been ever since I cracked open 1997’s Laid Bare, which is the best Hollywood memoir I’ve ever read.  It’s not one of those “warts and all” type books—John splayed open his soul and put it out there for all to see.  He writes about the carnality of Tinseltown; the Boulevard of Broken dreams; and those trampled underfoot.  He specializes in imploding Hollywood myths, and that, in my estimation, makes him dangerous.

Did I say bad-ass?  The man is scary and I’ll tell you why:  he has witnessed evil up close.  He knows where the bodies are buried; has seen the skeletons in the closet; understands everyone’s strange peccadilloes.  Gilmore is a literary surgeon whose pen is like a scalpel.  He peers into souls, reads minds and isn’t afraid to crack open the cadaver to find out what’s inside.  He divulges the secrets of the rich and famous and cold-blooded killers alike.

What separates Gilmore from the rest of the great noir/true crime writers is that he was there.  He befriended them all, the stars, starlets, has-beens, gangsters, pimps, hustlers, murderers, and strips away the glitz and glamour with the stroke of his cynical and merciless pen.  He is comfortable in the darkness and writes from a very shadowy place.  He is the sum total of his incredible life experiences: the son of an LA cop and a star-struck mom.  He’s been an actor, writer, director, teacher, painter, observer, confidant of legends, and myth maker as well as myth buster.  He has an angel on his shoulder and a devil in his prose.  He has looked evil in the eye many times and never flinched.

He’s from the Mad Men era where adults lived, loved and played hard; his literary voice comes from a life of gut-wrenching hardship, which he’ll admit, sometimes bordered on madness.  He has lived an unrepentant life, which included plenty of beautiful women, booze, and dope.  Most writers, including yours truly, secretly want to be loved by the public.  Gilmore tells them, “Go fuck yourself.”  I kind of like that.

He gives a whole new meaning to the word “embeddedness.”  He spent four decades gum-shoeing the story of the Black Dahlia, faced off with the likes of Charles Manson and his Family, and was the one scribe to whom murderer Charles Schmid chose to confess his hideous crimes.  Gilmore spent several years in the deep south and the “heart of Texas” researching the now mythic outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde.  Don’t expect to read a tale of folk heroes who robbed banks to get back at the establishment during the crushing economic times of the Great Depression. Gilmore’s version of the co-dependent, fast-running duo is raw, gritty and authentically American.  He gives the readers perhaps the truest and best account of their lives on the run.  But that is no surprise.  No one does Babylon, noir and crime better than John Gilmore.

BOOK AS OUTLAW, A Note by John Gilmore

Based on hard fact, ON THE RUN WITH BONNIE & CLYDE is by necessity part documentary, part true crime and memoir, part narrative and reportage, plus a personal account that arrives ipso facto as an outlaw.  The long haul of exploring the serpentine trail of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, seeking to understand them—to walk in their shoes, so to speak—narrowed my focus keenly in on Bonnie and Clyde themselves, and proved the only way to share their tale was to shed my own shoes, and ride with them.

Consequently, this offering rarely strays from Bonnie and Clyde in reconstructing a run that only narrowly includes situations in which they were not present, or circumstances that lay beyond the windshield of their lives.  In offsetting an obsession with their deaths, I have attempted to illuminate their lives:  how they birthed emotionally, bonding in their unyielding passion to the violent outcome of that union, and the only way to offer what I’ve learned is to reconstruct it as closely as it was lived.

I journeyed through Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, and Arizona.  I spent some time in Oklahoma and four years in Louisiana. It is now over 78 years since Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed on that lonely road in northern Louisiana.  Neither left personal records or diaries.  Apart from Bonnie’s long poems, Suicide Sal, and End of the Line (the latter title posthumously changed to The Story of Bonnie and Clyde), plus the many personal snapshots from Bonnie’s camera, or scraps of bullet-riddled clothing snipped with scissors from their bodies, or a pair of bloodstained glasses along with hats for each, there is almost nothing. Whatever dreams they possessed went up in gun smoke.

My hunt has been like opening a Chinese puzzle box or filling a jigsaw with missing pieces, seeking something other than a quasi-documentary guess at what might’ve been.  I’ve learned that almost everything in books, archives, old newspapers and offerings by so-called authorities or scarce survivors, even relatives and dubious one-time associates, has piled error upon error, camouflaging gaps with moralizing rhetoric or confusing issues with make-believe conviction. Each presentation seems to opinionate the previous—or worse, borrows from a 1967 slapstick melodrama, itself an avalanche of misinformation burying any genuine try for a ‘real story’.

There isn’t a ‘real story’.  Answers to real-life questions about Bonnie and Clyde are lost to history, while the deeper one digs, the more discrepancies are unearthed.  This has created an alternate reality which most have and will subscribe to.

Two others have pieced together an approximation of what might’ve occurred, and I salute the efforts of James R. Knight and Jonathan Davis for their 21st Century Update. I also thank Winston G. Ramsey for his Bonnie & Clyde, Then and Now, both works offering detailed explorations of that time, of what was and the remains that exist—graves under damaged headstones, pavements over once dangerous dirt roads, rotting bridges spanning empty washes, weathered shacks collapsing in desolate, windy fields.  The authors have done well in showing detailed portraits of what might have been, and what’s largely forgotten.

In offering this immediate portrait of their run across a disappeared American landscape, I’ve sought to bridge a gap of irresolute time and distance by bringing them to life through their language.  ON THE RUN WITH BONNIE CLYDE is therefore an attempt to reflect the essence of these two beings—bad, good, wildly in-between without grace or blessing.  I confess that my goal as a so-called “maverick author” has been to grasp a hoped-for truth in portraying them as their lives revealed, thus breaking the conventional, stereotypical shadows they’ve become.  This, as well as an improvised approach to move well beyond the disturbing errors in published or filmed “history”.

Readers who’ve enjoyed my past efforts, please accept this offering as from a servant of that concept—truth before dishonor.  Not the truth as with a hand on a Bible, but the truth that remains with “the last man standing.”  If this book must be labeled an “outlaw,” it is because I have told the truth of the nature of the outlaw—my blinkered vision on Clyde Barrow, the true loner emerging as the ultimate anti-societal antagonist, with Bonnie devoted to dying at his side. So this disclaimer says: Read this ‘outlaw’ book at your own risk.  My understanding of the emotional qualities of Bonnie and Clyde, and their psychological makeup, emerges from my long, relentless search for those whose paths they crossed—now so pitifully few remaining.  My thanks to Stuart Swezey, my publisher, for taking on this unconventional book and showing again the faith he has demonstrated for many years in creating a remarkable history in alternative publishing, thus enabling a maverick such as myself to explore the lives and death of two misfits who long-ago broke the status-quo and paid the price with their lives.

To be released May 1, 2012. Pre-order available at: http://www.amazon.com/Run-Bonnie-Clyde-John-Gilmore/dp/1878923226/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325447048&sr=1-2id

For more information please visit: http://www.johngilmore.com