Pretty boy Floyd. Larry McMurtry and Diana Osana. 1994.

The time is 1925. The place, St. Louis Missouri. Charley Floyd, a good-looking, sweet-smiling country boy from Oklahoma, working as a baker’s helper at the Kroger Bakery, has just taken the big two that will make him, very shortly, a legend in his own lifetime: he has just robbed his first armored car.

Charley is an irresistible invention, as American as Huck Finn, a young man so charming that it’s hard not to like him, even as he’s robbing you at gunpoint. The women in his life - his tough-looking mentor and lover, Ma Ash (an older woman who recognizes just where Charley is headed, but can’t stop him), his long-suffering loyal wife Ruby, his equally loyal girlfriend Beulah, his mother Mamie, and a good many more - are as charmed by him as the hill people of the Ozark, who hide him out when he’s on the run from the law. The only people who aren’t charmed by Charley are the federal agents tracking him down, particularly his nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, who sees in Pretty Boy Floyd a way of making his Bureau of Investigation famous.