Nearly everyone has heard of Bonnie and Clyde, the Depression-era desperados enduringly incarnated by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 movie. But Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid? They sound like a low-rent rock duo, but they were actually a Jazz Age crime couple notorious in their time.
Long forgotten, they have been resurrected by Glenn Stout in an entertaining new book named for them. It’s reasonable to ask why anybody should bother to disinter these century-old characters and chronicle their heedless exploits. But Mr. Stout, who specializes in sports histories, has embedded their story in a deft social history of the 1920s—the days of flappers and bootleggers, hot jazz and hot stocks, bloodthirsty thugs and corrupt cops and pols all careening toward the Great Crash. The reader gets taken along for the ride.
