Texas Ranger The epic life of Frank Hamer, the man who killed Bonnie and Clyde

Bad lives make good stories. A list of memorable villains would fill a long page: Long John Silver, Stagger Lee, Jesse James, Iago, Fagin. But a good man, even a man of "iron strength" and "iron will" and "iron character" and "iron courage" like Frank Hamer, might make a dull companion. Hamer was a Texas Ranger and the very emblem of the tall, broad-shouldered, straight-shooting lawman. In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, he took on lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, survived 52 gunfights and hunted bootleggers. He led the posse that killed Bonnie and Clyde on a gravel road in Louisiana in May 1934. Boessenecker's biography is fair-minded and thorough, but plodding. We learn that "the Dust Bowl resulted in enormous crop loss, unemployment and human misery" and that "the Roaring Twenties were a time of unprecedented prosperity, accompanied by rapid urbanization and wrenching social change." Occasional vivid scenes stand out. A sulky cafe owner ignored a Ranger trying to catch his eye. Finally the lawman drew his pistol, shot the coffee urn twice, and filled his cup with coffee spurting from the bullet holes. Bonnie and Clyde murdered a young policeman two weeks before his wedding day. His fiancée wore her wedding dress to the funeral. One chapter is particularly fine. In Sherman, Tex., in 1930, a black man named George Hughes was charged with rape. Hamer and a handful of Rangers tried to head off a mob of several thousand men, women and children screaming: "Roast him! Roast him! Burn him alive!" Someone set the courthouse aflame. When firefighters arrived, men in the crowd slashed their hoses. Boessenecker tells the gruesome story with power and force. EDWARD DOLNICK'S next book, "The Seeds of Life," tells the story of science's struggle to learn where babies come from. It will be published next year.