By Pat Empie, Grand Rapids Public Library
Sutton, a novel about the famous bank robber from the Great Depression grabs you and keeps you enthralled in his life of crime. Sutton educates, entertains, and delights the reader. It will appeal to a crossover audience of lovers of historical fiction, true-crime narratives and mystery novels. This poignant, comic, fast-paced and fact-studded story by Pulitzer Prize winner, J.R. Moehringer, tells the story of economic pain that feels eerily modern, while still unfolding a story of doomed love.
Willie Sutton came of age at a time when banks were out of control. If the banks weren’t taking brazen risks, causing millions to lose their jobs and homes, they were shamelessly seeking government bailouts. Sound familiar?
Trapped in a cycle of panics, depressions and soaring unemployment, Willie Sutton saw only one way out, and only one way to win the girl of his dreams. So he began a 30-year career of robbing banks, becoming one of America’s most successful bank robbers. Willie Sutton became so good at breaking into banks and such a master at breaking out of prisons, police called him one of the most dangerous men in New York, and the FBI put him on its first-ever Most Wanted List.
But the public rooted for Sutton. He never fired a shot and after all, his victims were merely those bloodsucking banks. When he was finally caught for good in 1952, crowds surrounded the jail and chanted his name.
Willie, the Actor, Sutton was released from Attica prison on Christmas Eve 1969, after serving 17 years. The irony that Gov. Rockefeller, a former banker, signed the order was not lost on Sutton. His lawyer made a deal with a newspaper for an exclusive, so Sutton spent his first night and the next day with a newspaper reporter and a photographer going on a chronological tour together of the scenes of Sutton’s exploits in and around New York City during his long life of crime. As they visit the sites of Sutton’s childhood, life and crimes, the old thief regales the reporter with stories and, more significantly, remembers the events for the reader in flashback narration.
