Thomas Mullen

Q&A with the Author: The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

Who were the Firefly Brothers?

Jason Fireson and his younger brother Whit were bank robbers active during the early years of the Great Depression, particularly 1933-34. Because of the magnitude of the Depression and the accompanying public disgust at the banks (blamed for causing the crash) and the government (blamed for not helping people cope with the crash), bank robbers like the Firefly Brothers became folk heroes, their every act celebrated by the legions of disgruntled, dispossessed, and disillusioned. Newspapers across the country reported on their every deed and misdeed (real and rumored), songwriters sung their praises, writers and artists fictionalized them in comic books and pulp novels and films.

After more than a year of robbing banks across the Midwest, always operating at least one step ahead of overmatched small-town police forces, the Firefly Brothers were finally killed one night in August 1934.

Supposedly.

The official story, widely reported by the press and trumpeted by a euphoric J. Edgar Hoover, whose newly formed Federal Bureau of Investigation took credit, was that the Firesons had run out of places to hide after the FBI had declared them "Public Enemy #1." The Firesons had been hiding out in an abandoned farmhouse in Points North, Indiana, where they were fatally ambushed by police who'd received an anonymous tip.

Yet rumors soon spread that the Firefly Brothers had in fact not been killed that night. Over the ensuing weeks, Firefly sightings were prevalent all across the Midwest. Jason and Whit were spotted by numerous witnesses robbing more banks, giving money to the poor, eluding police in car chases, delivering food to Hoovervilles, dating beautiful women, leading rallies for the rights of the unemployed, beating up price gougers and profiteers, and helping old widows carry their groceries.

As these stories reached a crescendo, the FBI reluctantly admitted that the Points North police may have killed the wrong people that fateful night.

No one really knew what to think.

But were the Firefly Brothers real?

Of course they were real. Why would I write about them if they weren't?

Um, because you're a novelist? Because you write fiction?

Ah. Good point. You have me there.

I got the idea for this book after reading a lot about Depression-era bank robbers like John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and Baby Face Nelson, all of whom were active in 1933-34. It was an amazing time. These larger-than-life characters were robbing dozens of banks across the country, getting front-page headlines, and captivating the public.

It was the perfect time to rob banks. The recent invention of the Thompson submachine gun (the Tommy gun) and the advent of faster cars and well-maintained highways meant that bank robbers could be more heavily equipped and speedier than small-town police forces, which typically had nothing but a few revolvers and old, hand-cranked Model-A Fords. These itinerant bank-robbing "gangs" weren't well-organized urban machines like Al Capone's Mob so much as a few like-minded men and women who tended to rob only small-town banks, staying clear of the big cities. Also, state police forces at the time were minor operations and didn't communicate with each other—you could rob a bank in Ohio, drive all night to Minnesota, and you might as well have fled to Mexico. This would change by mid-1934, when J. Edgar Hoover turned the Justice Department's minor Bureau of Investigation into what we now know as the FBI, a federalized police force capable of tracking national criminals. In the early years of the Depression, though, this wasn't yet the case.

Because of widespread anger and disgust at the banks and the government, these criminals were praised as often as they were excoriated. Plenty of people hated them, of course, and viewed them as yet another sign that the world was falling apart. But for many people whose worlds had been turned upside-down, who felt abandoned by country and law and God and all the things they had been taught to believe in, these bank robbers were heroes. They were fighting back. Stories spread that Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Clyde Barrow and the Firefly Brothers gave all (or at least most) of their money to the poor, or at least that they only robbed wealthy bankers and never did any harm to small, Mom & Pop businesses. They were seen as Robin Hoods for a modern and disenchanted and very scary age.

There had of course been earlier criminal folk heroes, like Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and the Newton Boys, but never before had there been so many such desperadoes operating at the same time, and so brazenly. And never before had they seemed to have such moral force and public outrage at their backs.

But, again, did the Firefly Brothers really die and come back to life?

Did John Dillinger really break out of jail using a wooden gun he'd whittled while in lockup? Did Pretty Boy Floyd really give all his money to the poor? Were Bonnie and Clyde really beautiful, star-crossed lovers who wrote poetry and couldn't get a break?

Part of what attracted me to the idea of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers was the melding of fact and fiction, the way that, even in 1934, there were so many crazy rumors circulating around the actual criminals. They were romanticized, fictionalized, lionized, heroized. They were blown out of all proportion to who they really were, while at the same time certain lesser aspects of their personalities and lifestyles were overlooked. (They did, let's not forget, kill people. Quite a lot of people.) I love the questions this poses about our identity and how it's really formed, about groupthink and social control, about our ability to craft our own fate. Plus, I'd get to throw in a car chase and some gunfights. What's not to like?

What was the toughest thing about writing this book?

Well, before getting to that, let me say that it was a ton of fun to write. If people have half as good a time reading this as I had writing it, then I will have some pleased readers indeed.

I'm a fiction writer. I love cool stories, I love to make stuff up. So I was intrigued by the possibilities that these Depression-era bank robbers presented. They were so larger-than-life: bank robberies with Tommy guns and fast cars and fedoras! Car chases and pretty girls and sharp suits and sharper lines! But there was a problem: this has been done before. We've all seen crime movies set in the Thirties, we've all seen bank robberies in cop shows on TV, we've read the pulp classics by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and seen their visions on the screen as film noir. I wanted to tackle this milieu, these characters, the crazy crucible of the Great Depression, but I would only do it if I could find a new angle, a different way in, something that had never been done.

I tried a few times to start the novel. I tried to write a bank robbery scene; it was terrible. I tried to write a chapter about a twelve-year-old future bank-robber working in his moralizing father's store; it was awful. So I put the chapters away and tried to write a completely different book on another subject. But I kept coming back to this idea, this time, these people.

One day I asked myself, People called Dillinger 'the man no jail can hold.' What if there were bank robbers whom death itself could not hold? What if there were bank robbers who died and came back to life?

I had no idea where I was going with that. But I liked it. I pictured the first chapter, the two bank robbers waking up in a police morgue, covered in bullet wounds. I helped them up, we got in our 1933 Terraplane and pulled on our fedoras and strapped on our bulletproof vests and headed thataway, with no clear idea of where we'd end up.

I'm getting a sense you're attracted to the gray area where fact and fiction meld?

Where they meld, where they combine, where they fight, where they disagree and call each other names and tell different stories and make excuses and try to see which one makes more sense.

After the publication of my first novel, The Last Town on Earth, a few people asked me, "There's a lot of history in this book - did you ever think of writing it as nonfiction instead?" My answer was Noooooo. I'm a novelist, I've always thought of myself as a novelist, and the thought of telling a story that had to be so tightly constrained by facts and dates and times and places is outright terrifying. It just doesn't seem as much fun.

This was 2006-2007, when memoirs were ascendant in the publishing world (even the memoirs that turned out not to be true), and in general the sales of nonfiction works were blowing the sales of fiction out of the water. So I started thinking of this, of the apparent preference for nonfiction, for true stories, for things that actually happened. There seems to be this popular distaste for fiction, for making things up, which I just don't understand. I do appreciate nonfiction (much more than I used to), and I read a ton of it. But I love fiction too, I love fiction more, and I felt compelled to write a book that would show off all of fiction's wonderful possibilities. Its ability to captivate and amaze, to enthrall and transport, to stun and move. I wanted to write a book that took the best of fiction and the best of nonfiction and threw them together, turned them upside-down, played them against each other.

Sometimes when people praise a work of nonfiction, they use the old saying that "truth is stranger than fiction." I took that as a direct challenge. If truth is stranger than fiction, then I wanted to write something that was stranger than truth.

Here we are suffering through the greatest economic slowdown since the Great Depression, and now you're publishing a book set during the Great Depression. Was that deliberate?

Not at all. I wrote this book when we were in far better times—I wasn't trying to draw any parallels, because there weren't any at the time! I did the final round of edits on the third draft just as Lehman Brothers was collapsing in October 2008. During the time in which the book was out of my hands and in production, so much changed.

That being said, part of the reason I wanted to write this book is because I've always wanted to tackle issues of financial struggle in fiction. I do this a bit in The Last Town on Earth, but I wanted to explore this further: what it's like to struggle through hard times, what it does to you psychologically, how it affects your worldview and your family and your future. This is a tricky thing to address in fiction without becoming too dark or heavy-handed or preachy, and I realized that an exciting tale of bank robbers would allow me to work with these issues in a lighter way.

Also, I was struck by the fact that most books (novels and nonfiction) and films about the 1930s bank robbers barely mentioned the Depression, or just used it as a backdrop, maybe tossing in a quick scene with a Hooverville or a poor farmer. For the most part, they tell their stories of well-dressed, debonair robbers as if they lived in a completely separate world from their fellow Americans, but that wasn't the case. What about the robbers' families, at home sick with worry, morally opposed to their crimes but relying on them to pay the bills; hounded by police and feds who want them to rat their brothers or sons out; watching amazed while their neighbors and total strangers read about and talk about their sons' or brothers' exploits? What must it have been like for them?

I imagine that readers will find some of the details of the Depression, and the characters' reaction to their situations, to be very different from what we're living through now. But I think they'll find that some parts too will ring eerily true to today's world, in ways I myself never could have imagined when I'd first put them down on paper.

So is this book historical fiction or literary fiction or pulp fiction? Crime fiction or character-driven fiction?

All of the above, I hope!

Further Reading Suggestions

As listed in The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers' acknowledgments page, the following works were hugely helpful as I researched the Depression-era bank robbers:

• Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934 by Bryan Burroughs
• Pretty Boy by Michael Wallis
• The Dillinger Days by John Toland
• Hard Times by Studs Terkel
• The Hungry Years by T.H. Watkins
• The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping by Lloyd C. Gardner
• Public Enemies: America's Criminal Past by William Helmer and Rick Mattix, and
• Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940 by David E. Kyvig

If you enjoyed Firefly Brothers and are looking for other novels that play fast and loose with the facts surrounding real-life criminals, here are a few of my favorites:

• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Rob Hansen
• True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
• Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow

Though I don't consider The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers to be a straight-up noir (whatever that means), it does incorporate elements of the classic noir tales (whatever that means). Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and countless other writers of large and minor fame told great tales of crime and desperation in and around the 1930s, with detectives and femme fatales, dark alleys and darker secrets and the darkest wells of the soul. They inspired some of our classic films, not to mention generations of mystery writers. Even non-mystery writers like myself have caught the bug, and here are a few of my favorite contemporary novels that dabble with noir conventions:

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
• Motherless Brooklyn and Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem
• Citizen Vince and The Zero by Jess Walter
• The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
• Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

And here are my favorites of the classic noirs:

• The Lady in the Lake; The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; and really pretty much anything by Raymond Chandler
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
• A goldmine of shorter tales can be discovered in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, an awesome collection edited by Otto Penzler