Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid

December 21, 2020
Journalist Stout (Fenway 1912) puts the illicit exploits of jewel thieves Richard “Candy Kid” Whittemore and Margaret “Tiger Girl” Messler in the context of the Jazz Age in this rollicking true crime tale. Noting that the U.S. endured one of its sharpest economic downturns in the years after WWI, Stout describes the couple’s working-class childhoods in Baltimore and their 1921 marriage (“like so many of their age, all they wanted to be was something other than what they were”). A juvenile delinquent, Whittemore enlisted in the Coast Guard at age 16, was dishonorably discharged, and ended up in prison for breaking into a house eight days after his wedding to Margaret. When he got out, he formed a gang and robbed jewelry stores in New York City, netting upwards of $300,000 per heist. (Margaret often cased the places before the break-ins.) When they were caught and put on trial in 1926, Stout writes, thousands of flappers and wannabe gangsters gathered outside the courthouse to support the couple. Stout colorfully evokes the era’s political issues and cultural trends, and describes how Prohibition increased disrespect for the law across American society. This snappy page-turner informs and delights.

January 1, 2021

Stout (Young Women and the Sea) explores the dark underbelly of the Jazz Age through the lens of America's first gangster couple, Margaret and Richard Whittemore. The press deemed Margaret "Tiger Girl" for her criminal participation (considered unusual for a woman) and ferocity in defending her husband; Richard's smooth-talking reputation garnered him the nickname "Candy Kid." Through newspaper research, Stout tells the story of the criminal couple time forgot and fashions them as the original Bonnie and Clyde. Born in Baltimore, the young and poor Whittemores quickly learned vast wealth did not often come legally. They teamed up with figures Whittemore met during stints in prison to create one of the first and most successful criminal syndicates of the 1920s, committing jewel heists, robberies, burglaries, and eventually murder in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Buffalo, and Cleveland until they were finally caught and tried in the mid-1920s. At times, Stout's writing suffers from purple prose and focuses much more on the Candy Kid than the Tiger Girl. Despite a slow start, however, the narrative picks up around the middle and ends with a flourish. VERDICT Those interested in tales of white-collar crime and 20th-century history will be pleased.--Jessica Hilburn, Benson Memorial Lib., Titusville, PA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
Rip-roaring account of the Jazz Age's most-feared gangster couple. Before infamous criminal lovebirds Bonnie and Clyde, there were Richard "Candy Kid" and Margaret ("Tiger Girl" Whittemore, whose big-city jewel heists and bank robberies made the Barrow Gang's stickups look like candy snatching in comparison. In his latest, journalist and sportswriter Stout raises his game a notch, transitioning from quaint sports history books to this true-crime barn burner, set against the backdrop of a post-World War I America rolling in wealth and prosperity. "Bank vaults were full and brimming over," writes the author, "and all the businesses that catered to this newfound wealth--the jewelers and furriers and night clubs and jazz joints and new car lots--were raking it in by the fistful." Both brought up in Baltimore with virtually no economic prospects, Richard and Margaret married young and faced uncertain futures, with Richard engaging in petty thefts that saw him in and out of prison with not much to show for it. However, it wasn't long before he began making powerful contacts in the criminal underworld and attempting more formidable crime sprees--with his wife by his side. The couple moved from Baltimore to more cosmopolitan climes like Philadelphia and New York, working within a criminal syndicate robbing banks or staging jewelry heists. As they found further success in the criminal game, they enjoyed a glamorous lifestyle of all-night parties, luxury apartments, and fast cars. However, Richard's inevitable downfall came at the age of 25, when an informant turned him in. Stout's fast-paced prose has a Mickey Spillane-like cadence to it that fits his subject matter perfectly. The narrative is unrelenting to the bitter end, when Richard had to confront the kind of forced early retirement that guys in his profession almost invariably faced. A compulsively readable criminal biography as well as a vivid cultural snapshot of early Prohibition-era America.

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March 1, 2021
Veteran journalist Stout moves away from his usual sports beat (The Selling of the Babe, 2016), among many other titles) to tell the tale of Richard Whittemore and Margaret Messler, Jazz Age crooks, bank robbers, and murderers--the flapper and her man. A decade before Bonnie and Clyde, the Whittemores, who married in 1921 after they experienced working-class Baltimore childhoods, were yearning for bigger lives. They found those lives, at least for a while, leading a gang of jewelry thieves who stole millions before being apprehended and becoming tabloid heroes to readers who embraced the media-created saga of star-crossed romance. Stout brings the Whittemores and their era to vivid life in this engrossing biography. Based primarily on contemporaneous newspaper reports (the Whittemores have barely been touched on in books), the story is romantic and violent, exhilarating and tragic. Stout has clearly done a ton of research on the period, and he's really captured the unique combination of prosperity and desperation that was the Roaring Twenties. The Whittemores finally take their place in the pantheon of early-twentieth-century criminals.

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