Adventures in Contemporary Historical Fiction 

Or:

How the Drifter went for a romantic joyride only to get blindsided on the information superhighway. 

"Success in any endeavor requires single-minded attention to detail and total concentration." 

---Willie Sutton

Reading this book.  Picked it up at my brother and sister in law's house on West Coast during Xmas vacation and though they offered to let me take it with me, I forgot to.  I was intrigued enough to grab a copy for myself when I got back home.  Starts off kinda strong and Willie Sutton is a compelling character, and going in, I knew little beyond his "Robin Hood" reputation as a non-violent and creative thief/escape artist and his (apocryphal) reply: "Cause that's where the money is"  to a reporter's question: "Why do you rob banks?"   (Sutton denied ever saying it) 



But after an artful prologue and establishment of a risky literary conceit imagining what transpired in the day's following Sutton's release from prison in 1969, author Moehringer mopes and meanders and indulges in clumsy sentimentality built around the notion that Sutton's entire life was haunted and cursed by the loss of the love of his life at the age of 17.

 Ok, fine, wouldn't be the first time...except...It's not true!  As the book progressively disappointed as credible history, I remained curious and went digging for more and discovered that the author seems to have flipped the facts to suit his conceit. (I say "seems" cause I'm hoping to discover that I am the one in error here and that I've missed something along the way).   The love of Sutton's life was not his love, but the love of his boyhood friend and accomplice, William Johnston.  Moehringer says the poverty stricken teenage Sutton was in love with the wild and adventurous upper crust Bessie Endner, and that he conspired with her (and pal Johnston) to rob her wealthy father in order to elope and defy the father's command that Sutton cease in his pursuit of her affections. When they pull off the heist and get caught a few weeks later (In Sutton's own mistaken version--it was two months later)  Sutton and his pal are tried and sentenced to probation and Bess is banished to Europe.  But when you read some of the newspaper accounts of the actual events, one after another they all contradict Moehringer. It wasn't Sutton and Bessie, it was Johnston and Bessie--and Sutton tagging along as the third wheel.

At first I thought, well, maybe the newspaper accounts got it all wrong (cause like Mark Twain said, "people lie to the press and then believe what they read in the papers") but I kept digging and couldn't find anything to support Moehringer's version except for a few things in Sutton's own version in his "as told to" book I, Willie Sutton, written with Quentin Reynolds,  in which he claims that Bessie was "my girl" but nothing more, though he also makes it clear that his story is " how I prefer to remember it".  But Moehringer goes beyond revising some facts and indulges in long passages describing how Sutton and Bess swept each other off their feet during an extended courtship that blossomed into an all consuming infatuation with each other--which is not corroborated by any accounts given by any others at the time or even by Sutton himself who in his two very contradictory "autobiographies" neglects to call much attention to this teen romance outside of the fact that he feels like he "screwed things up" for her.

In this story (link below) and subsequent ones from New York Sun starting on Monday February 17, 1919--there are quotes from too many of the participants to make it plausible that somehow the reporters misreported.  Moehringer has constructed a tale that revolves around a real life Romeo and Juliet theme except that in real life it turns out that Juliet hooked up with Mercutio.

http://fultonhistory.com/newspaper%209/New%20York%20NY%20Sun/New%20York%20NY%20Sun%201919%20Grayscale/New%20York%20NY%20Sun%201919%20Grayscale%20-%200085.pdf

So I went chasing Moehringer and read about how he researched the book (and how he hired a fact checker to help him) and tried to remain true to the historical record despite his admitted liberty taking with some chronology and other minor details.  But unless I'm totally mistaken and have missed something that would explain this far from minor discrepancy, then it's kind of appalling that he did this.  And how come no one has stepped forward to call the foul?

But hold your horses...it's now a day after I wrote the above and last night I finished the book and discovered --Voila! Moehringer was pulling my chain.  He was deliberately setting the reader up for a denouement wherein Sutton is revealed to have been fooling himself (and us) all along. Aha, so Moehringer wants us to see that Sutton spent his life deluding himself about his past, and this romantic fiction is only one of the things about which he lied to himself and others.  Okay then, mystery solved and this reader can rest easy and cancel all plans to blow the whistle--but what remains is a sour taste and some resentment.  I think Moehringer took more liberties than he needed to and far more than seems fair in a work that purports to be founded on the historical record. Historical fiction only works when you can trust the accuracy of the history so you can then willingly accept the imaginative overlay of the fiction.  Otherwise it's just....fiction.  And BTW, Sutton is a far better writer than Moehringer--and his letter from prison to the grown daughter he hadn't seen since she was 4,  is a beautifully rendered piece of  heartbreaking prose.
You can read it here: 
http://books.google.com/books?id=mRVS5RXyP74C&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=Willie+Sutton+letter+to+his+daughter&source=bl&ots=smz13FJaYf&sig=hh64GNV_V5w-h2D19k9KmOVWnwY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=KUPwUL_EMoHY0QGcgYHACQ&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Willie%20Sutton%20letter%20to%20his%20daughter&f=false



And while on the subject of literary erroneousness... In this book (right), which is the current choice for the men's reading group ( my son refers to it as the "eating group") of which I am an attendee, the author states that “Sam the Banana Man,” a fruit magnate from Alabama donated a banana boat that became the refugee ship Exodus.  Well, just so happens that "The Banana Man" ( One Samuel Zemurry From New Orleans, LA, not Alabama) was the subject of the last book our group read:  The Fish That Ate The Whale:  The Life and Times of America's Banana King, which is the most recent book by the same author.  Once again, I'm intrigued to learn more and I discover that the infamous "Exodus" ship was not a Sam Zemurray banana boat, but "a Baltimore packet steamer, the President Warfield."  Funny that the author gets a fact wrong while researching an earlier book that is  sure to become evident to him when he gets around to researching a future one.  

The SS Exodus, formerly the Baltimore Steam Packet Company's President Warfield, arriving with 4,515 Jewish refugees at Haifa on 20 July, 1947