Book reviews: Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde | Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO THIS morning, the bumbling Depression-era stickup artist Clyde Barrow and his girlfriend Bonnie Parker died in a hail of bullets on a Louisiana road. For the next 30 years, the ruthless, clueless Dallas duo were all but forgotten, apart from the occasional pulp magazine feature and a B-movie or two.

Then along came Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty, stars of the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, and everything changed. Before that, the real-life murderers (they had killed ten people between them) had attracted the interest of just one biographer. Since the film, they've been the subject of at least ten.

The latest, by Jeff Guinn, has plenty of details to add to the familiar story. Bonnie and Clyde were poor kids from the dusty slums of West Dallas, both in their early twenties, scrawny (Clyde was barely 5ft 6in) and possessing a sense of entitlement far beyond their meagre talents. Clyde, whose family lived in a tent for much of his youth, was a school dropout who followed his older brother Buck into life as a car thief, cat burglar and armed robber; Clyde thought so highly of himself that he changed his middle name from Chestnut to Champion. Bonnie had been a teenage bride whose husband abandoned her to a life of baby-sitting, glamour magazines and boredom. All she wanted was excitement, and on meeting Clyde at a party in January 1930, she found it.

There followed two years of prologue: Clyde's arrest and jailing in the Central Texas city of Waco; Bonnie's smuggling a pistol to him; Clyde's escape and recapture in far-off Ohio; his sentencing to the brutal Eastham Prison Farm; the toes he chopped off to avoid a work detail. He was paroled and reunited with Bonnie, and in the summer of 1932 the two finally began their criminal career together.

From Minnesota to New Mexico to Memphis, they'd drive till they ran out of money, then rob to get some. Along the way they endured a series of misadventures the movie ignores, including a prison breakout and a car crash in which Bonnie's legs were burned to the bone.

At the end of every trip, Bonnie and Clyde would circle back to West Dallas to see their families. Guinn is especially good at showing how all the family members worked together to clothe and feed them and basically keep them in business.

A good amount of new detail about Bonnie and Clyde has emerged in the last 20 years, much of it unearthed by the Dallas historian John Neal Phillips and a small army of dedicated hobbyists, not to mention the information contained in two books by Clyde's sister Marie. Guinn packages this material, plus some nuggets he himself discovered, into a fine work of history.

As thorough as it is, his book is not without minor annoyances. Given the proliferation of other books on the same subject, it makes no sense for Guinn to claim this is an "untold" story. And given how thin the source base is, Guinn accepts too readily a far-fetched tale or two, like a story told by Blanche Barrow (Clyde's brother Buck's wife) that FBI boss J Edgar Hoover visited her in jail. Or the self-serving tale Clyde told friends of being raped in prison and gaining his revenge by killing the rapist. Guinn also asserts that most major Depression-era bank robberies were inside jobs, aided by bribed employees or the local police, even though Bonnie and Clyde themselves never appeared to benefit from such an arrangement.

Still, these are minor quibbles by comparison with what's wrong with Paul Schneider's Bonnie and Clyde. Right from the start, it's written in the present tense, a sure sign that the history you are reading is being imagined, not written from research. Worse, Schneider inexplicably resorts to narrating in the second person. Thus we are fed dozens of sentences like these, all from Clyde's viewpoint: "Oh Lordy, here we go. You look out the window and, sure enough, laws are everywhere and they've got a car parked blocking your way out of the driveway. You start giving orders." Any reader can guess what happens next. To quote the gun itself: Rata rata rata rata rata rata. And who can forget the cop car's priceless reply? Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

This bizarre approach reaches its zenith when Schneider imagines Clyde's thoughts as he dies at the hands of a posse armed with Browning automatic rifles: "Funny thing is, you can watch your own killing without anger – who would have thought? The six lawmen are coming out of their hiding places now, still firing their silent bullets into the car. What are they? Gone crazy? The bullets go into your body and Bonnie's. God, you used to love those guns. When did the cops get BARs? So them laws finally got some decent guns, did they? About time they took a lesson from old dead Clyde." And about time, I couldn't help thinking, that you give up reading the book too.