Thieves Like Us - Edward Anderson

Category: Crime, Novel, Thriller
Language: English
Keywords: Crime Fiction Noir

Written by Edward Anderson
Read by Mike Dennis
Format: M4B
Unabridged

Thieves Like Us is classic hardboiled fiction. Raymond Chandler declared that Anderson was better than Steinbeck, and Thieves Like Us was “one of the best stories of thieves ever written…one of the forgotten novels of the ’30s”.

The story follows the exploits of three desperate escaped convicts. They rob banks and have a string of successes. They buy guns, nice clothes, and fast cars and read about themselves in the newspapers. Bowie, the central figure of the three thieves, had been serving time for a murder he committed when only 16. Bowie falls in love with Keechie, the cousin of one of his partners, and she joins him on the run.

First published in 1937, Anderson’s Thieves Like Us offered gritty realism. The Depression had unleashed an infamous crime spree. Gangsters like Baby Face Nelson, Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde were in the headlines, and across America desperate men were driven to crime. Anderson drew on his own rough experiences during the Depression, and he interviewed prisoners at Huntsville prison, recording their stories and making note of their speech patterns and perspectives. Anderson used this research to create rich characterizations like T-Dub, who provides the novel’s title when he refers to bankers, politicians, and the like as “just thieves like us”.

This widely acclaimed classic has been adapted to film twice, by Nicholas Ray in 1949 and Robert Altman in 1974, and the Library of America included it in Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 1940s. Mike Dennis has just the right amount of grit in his voice, the perfect touch of menace, and a facility with accents that make him the ideal narrator for Thieves Like Us.