The time is 1925. The place, St. Louis, Missouri. Charley Floyd, a good-looking, sweet-smiling country boy from Oklahoma working as a baker's helper at the Kroger Bakery, has just taken the big step that will make him, very shortly, a legend in his own lifetime: he has just robbed his first armored car.

Charley is an irresistible invention, as American as Huck Finn, a young man so charming that it's hard not to like him, even as he's robbing you at gunpoint.

The women in his life - his tough-talking mentor and lover, Ma Ash (an older woman who recognizes just where Charley is headed, but can't stop him), his long-suffering, loyal wife, Ruby, his equally loyal girlfriend, Beulah, his mother, Mamie, and a good many more - are as charmed by him as the hill people of the Ozarks, who hide him out when he's on the run from the law. The only people who aren't charmed by Charley are the federal agents tracking him down, particularly his nemesis, J.

Edgar Hoover, who sees in Pretty Boy Floyd a way of making his Bureau of Investigation famous.

Written in collaboration by Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lonesome Dove, and his screen-writing partner, Diana Ossana, Pretty Boy Floyd, soon to be a major motion picture, is as fast-paced as Charley Floyd's own career, which takes him from small-time robbery to national notoriety in a roller-coaster ride of bank heists, love affairs, shootings, and newspaper headlines that exemplifies both the celebrity hunger of the Depression era and the glamour that surrounded - and inevitably destroyed - young men like Charley Floyd, who chose, for the most part out of boredom with rural life, the outlaw trail.