Dillinger's Got Nothing On Us: Author's Notes and Babble
J2 RPS AU
PG-13
Author notes and hysterical historical babble
Master post
Art
Except for my various nanonovels, this is probably the longest (mostly-)cohesive fic I've ever written. It's also my first RPS, and probably goes without saying that it's my first bigbang. Writing it was an exercise in frustration, and I think the only reasons I finished it are a. I'd been telling people about it since Wincon, and b. I had to, otherwise it would never be done.
I've been sitting with the germ of the story for two or three years. The fic that exists now is not the fic I originally planned to write. I'm ok with that.
I don't think I've ever written a story long enough and involved enough to deserve an author's note, and I am totally taking advantage of the fact that I finally have. That means the rest of this post is highly self-indulgent and spoilery and you can skip it if you want.
But if you want to read about the genesis of the story, the half-assed process by which the thing was written, and the ridiculous research I did, continue on. :D
The seed of this story is a vintage photo of two guys from a flickr set that someone on my flist linked to a couple years ago. I decided the two guys had gotten their picture taken on their way to rob a bank or something - I mean, they have the pistol - because I thought a m/m Bonnie and Clyde type story would be interesting. I kicked the idea around without ever writing anything, and then a lightbulb went off in my head last summer, when spn_j2_bigbang fics started appearing. I started writing snippets of what I wanted to be the Bonnie and Clyde story of Jared and Jensen. In its early days it was called The Ballad of Jared and Jensen, as a takeoff on one of Bonnie Parker's poems, which I remembered as The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. (It's actually titled The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.)
It was originally going to be half Jensen pov and half Jared pov, so some of the snippets - Chad writing to Henry Ford, the scene with Beth the little blonde girl in front of the post office, a bit from their first robbery, a scene that started with Jared running the car off the road, of which nothing remains except the tiny bit after they escape Abilene - started out from Jared's pov and had to be redone. I wrote the epilogue before I had any idea how the story ended, and in fact before I'd even written the beginning. I wrote without a net - no outline, no nothing, just a very short list of the plot points I wanted to hit - and I did a couple thousand words of random bits before I even knew how it started. Once I got my head out of my ass and figured out the beginning, I had to figure out how to put everything together, so the fic-in-progress was pretty consistently a huge, huge mess.
I thought up the title in the middle of April, on the train home from NYC, and then I had to find a way to work it in so it made sense.
I don't think I ever really knew what I was doing until I was done. I definitely didn't know what I was getting into until it was too late.
I made liberal use of Google and its image search - oh god, all the cars - Wikipedia, and Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. I also made a couple passes at my flist, because my flist knows everything. (My first sources were movies - Public Enemies and Bonnie and Clyde. Good visuals, a good introduction to some basic story elements, excellent background music, a bit of historical inaccuracy.)
I did a lot of random research for a lot of tiny mentions - I looked for maps of the highway system in the early 30s, I looked up what movies might have shown in San Antonio in January 1933 and what theaters might have shown them, I wanted to know the names of Depression-era banks in the midwest, were there any actresses who fit what seems to be Jared's type of petite girls with long brown hair, were any of the more famous gangsters in San Antonio between 1932-1934, when did Rand McNally start printing road maps, was the Alamo open to tourists in 1932 and who led American/Texas troops when Santa Ana took it, where will you end up if you drive two or so hours north of Shreveport, how did drinking San Antonians get around Prohibition, when did Prohibition end anyway, can your buddies patch you up if you get shot in the arm or will you lose the use of it unless you go to the hospital, what's a winning poker hand, where would you put a horse farm in Kentucky, did the Newton Boys rob anything besides trains and what happened to them, what does a 1934 four-door Ford V-8 look like, when did Kansas City get a professional baseball team, what day of the week was Christmas in 1932? I bought a map to track all the banks the boys knocked over and all the other significant places they stopped.
Every bank I mention in the story was a real bank in the early 30s, really located in the city where the boys rob it. Every character with a name is likewise an AU version of a real person, except for Beth the little blonde girl outside the post office. Characters without names are either people who I'm not sure actually exist (like Jennifer's husband) or whose names I can't remember or just don't know (like Jensen's sister and Chad's sibs), or they're random original characters (like the widower who lives down the street from Jennifer and her husband, or the little old lady in Abilene and Rodney the scottie dog). Ten points if you can put accurate last names to all the first names. :D Or, in the case of the FBI, first names to all the last names.
Oddly enough, I did not do any research on guns.
I learned that some of the really serious dust storms in the Great Plains happened between 1933 and 1935, and 1930 was actually the tail end of a wet period, so late 1932 is possibly a couple years too early for Chris' uncles to lose their Dust Bowl farm to, er, dust. I plead narrative necessity.
(Chad's San Antonio address, likewise, does not actually exist. Researching 1930s neighborhoods was a little beyond my scope. Also Chris very probably wouldn't have heard of the Stork Club in Texas in 1932, and I know Fords in the early 30s didn't have trunks - if you put people in the back seat and still wanted to take your luggage with you, you tied it to the back or the roof of the car - and from pictures I don't think they had glove boxes either.)
Some of the things I have the boys doing are based on actual events. The letters John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow supposedly wrote to Henry Ford in praise of his V-8 engine are generally regarded as fakes, altho there's a theory that Bonnie actually wrote the letter ascribed to Clyde. But the Barrow Gang did kidnap a couple in the process of stealing the guy's car and drove them around for a few hours before letting them go, and when Dillinger broke out of the jail in Crown Point, IN, he did indeed escape in Sheriff Lillian Holley's Ford.
(And Machine Gun Kelly really did pass thru San Antonio in September of 1933. He was there for like three days.)
Hoover's Bureau was just some random government agency until the Kansas City Massacre in June 1933, when a few agents and cops (and one bank robber) were shot leaving the train station. Before that, FBI agents weren't even allowed to carry guns. The exceptions were a few old-time lawmen referred to as Cowboys, who Hoover allowed to run things their way. The FBI was a disorganized mess in the early days, making it kind of hard to effectively track and trap interstate criminals in cars.
I wanted kind of a realistic ending - I was doing all this random research for historical accuracy, after all - but the reality is that bank robbers and gangsters had a short shelf life. Alvin Karpis, who was probably the brains behind the Karpis-Barker Gang, managed to die an old man in Spain - he was seventy - but he's the exception. The big names ended up in prison (when Karpis was sent to Alcatraz he commented that it was like Old Home Week because he knew so many guys already there) or on a slab. I mean, it's fairly popular knowledge that Dillinger was betrayed by a Woman in Red (altho actually it was an orange skirt) and shot to death outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, and if you look online you can find footage of the aftermath of the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde. The FBI got Pretty Boy Floyd a few months after Dillinger. Baby Face Nelson died of wounds received in a shootout not long after that. Machine Gun Kelly keeled over from a heart attack in jail.
(Wives, girlfriends, criminal associates, and not-quite-as-famous gang members sometimes survived jail and hit at least middle age. WD Jones, who ran with Bonnie and Clyde, did time, was paroled, and was shot to death in 1974. But on the flip side, Charles Mackley and Pete Pierpont, who were part of the Dillinger Gang, tried to escape from prison in the late 30s - one of them was killed in the attempt and the other was caught and later executed.)
I didn't want to cheat the ending of my story, but I didn't want to kill the boys either. So I leave it up to you to decide what happened to them.
I should mention outside the cut that while I did a lot of research and tried to be as historically accurate as possible, I fudged a couple things and made some stuff up. So if you find a historical error, yeah, that's my fault.
( If you're still curious, and you have the patience, there's more.)
PG-13
Author notes and hysterical historical babble
Master post
Art
Except for my various nanonovels, this is probably the longest (mostly-)cohesive fic I've ever written. It's also my first RPS, and probably goes without saying that it's my first bigbang. Writing it was an exercise in frustration, and I think the only reasons I finished it are a. I'd been telling people about it since Wincon, and b. I had to, otherwise it would never be done.
I've been sitting with the germ of the story for two or three years. The fic that exists now is not the fic I originally planned to write. I'm ok with that.
I don't think I've ever written a story long enough and involved enough to deserve an author's note, and I am totally taking advantage of the fact that I finally have. That means the rest of this post is highly self-indulgent and spoilery and you can skip it if you want.
But if you want to read about the genesis of the story, the half-assed process by which the thing was written, and the ridiculous research I did, continue on. :D
The seed of this story is a vintage photo of two guys from a flickr set that someone on my flist linked to a couple years ago. I decided the two guys had gotten their picture taken on their way to rob a bank or something - I mean, they have the pistol - because I thought a m/m Bonnie and Clyde type story would be interesting. I kicked the idea around without ever writing anything, and then a lightbulb went off in my head last summer, when spn_j2_bigbang fics started appearing. I started writing snippets of what I wanted to be the Bonnie and Clyde story of Jared and Jensen. In its early days it was called The Ballad of Jared and Jensen, as a takeoff on one of Bonnie Parker's poems, which I remembered as The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. (It's actually titled The Story of Bonnie and Clyde.)
It was originally going to be half Jensen pov and half Jared pov, so some of the snippets - Chad writing to Henry Ford, the scene with Beth the little blonde girl in front of the post office, a bit from their first robbery, a scene that started with Jared running the car off the road, of which nothing remains except the tiny bit after they escape Abilene - started out from Jared's pov and had to be redone. I wrote the epilogue before I had any idea how the story ended, and in fact before I'd even written the beginning. I wrote without a net - no outline, no nothing, just a very short list of the plot points I wanted to hit - and I did a couple thousand words of random bits before I even knew how it started. Once I got my head out of my ass and figured out the beginning, I had to figure out how to put everything together, so the fic-in-progress was pretty consistently a huge, huge mess.
I thought up the title in the middle of April, on the train home from NYC, and then I had to find a way to work it in so it made sense.
I don't think I ever really knew what I was doing until I was done. I definitely didn't know what I was getting into until it was too late.
I made liberal use of Google and its image search - oh god, all the cars - Wikipedia, and Bryan Burrough's book Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. I also made a couple passes at my flist, because my flist knows everything. (My first sources were movies - Public Enemies and Bonnie and Clyde. Good visuals, a good introduction to some basic story elements, excellent background music, a bit of historical inaccuracy.)
I did a lot of random research for a lot of tiny mentions - I looked for maps of the highway system in the early 30s, I looked up what movies might have shown in San Antonio in January 1933 and what theaters might have shown them, I wanted to know the names of Depression-era banks in the midwest, were there any actresses who fit what seems to be Jared's type of petite girls with long brown hair, were any of the more famous gangsters in San Antonio between 1932-1934, when did Rand McNally start printing road maps, was the Alamo open to tourists in 1932 and who led American/Texas troops when Santa Ana took it, where will you end up if you drive two or so hours north of Shreveport, how did drinking San Antonians get around Prohibition, when did Prohibition end anyway, can your buddies patch you up if you get shot in the arm or will you lose the use of it unless you go to the hospital, what's a winning poker hand, where would you put a horse farm in Kentucky, did the Newton Boys rob anything besides trains and what happened to them, what does a 1934 four-door Ford V-8 look like, when did Kansas City get a professional baseball team, what day of the week was Christmas in 1932? I bought a map to track all the banks the boys knocked over and all the other significant places they stopped.
Every bank I mention in the story was a real bank in the early 30s, really located in the city where the boys rob it. Every character with a name is likewise an AU version of a real person, except for Beth the little blonde girl outside the post office. Characters without names are either people who I'm not sure actually exist (like Jennifer's husband) or whose names I can't remember or just don't know (like Jensen's sister and Chad's sibs), or they're random original characters (like the widower who lives down the street from Jennifer and her husband, or the little old lady in Abilene and Rodney the scottie dog). Ten points if you can put accurate last names to all the first names. :D Or, in the case of the FBI, first names to all the last names.
Oddly enough, I did not do any research on guns.
I learned that some of the really serious dust storms in the Great Plains happened between 1933 and 1935, and 1930 was actually the tail end of a wet period, so late 1932 is possibly a couple years too early for Chris' uncles to lose their Dust Bowl farm to, er, dust. I plead narrative necessity.
(Chad's San Antonio address, likewise, does not actually exist. Researching 1930s neighborhoods was a little beyond my scope. Also Chris very probably wouldn't have heard of the Stork Club in Texas in 1932, and I know Fords in the early 30s didn't have trunks - if you put people in the back seat and still wanted to take your luggage with you, you tied it to the back or the roof of the car - and from pictures I don't think they had glove boxes either.)
Some of the things I have the boys doing are based on actual events. The letters John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow supposedly wrote to Henry Ford in praise of his V-8 engine are generally regarded as fakes, altho there's a theory that Bonnie actually wrote the letter ascribed to Clyde. But the Barrow Gang did kidnap a couple in the process of stealing the guy's car and drove them around for a few hours before letting them go, and when Dillinger broke out of the jail in Crown Point, IN, he did indeed escape in Sheriff Lillian Holley's Ford.
(And Machine Gun Kelly really did pass thru San Antonio in September of 1933. He was there for like three days.)
Hoover's Bureau was just some random government agency until the Kansas City Massacre in June 1933, when a few agents and cops (and one bank robber) were shot leaving the train station. Before that, FBI agents weren't even allowed to carry guns. The exceptions were a few old-time lawmen referred to as Cowboys, who Hoover allowed to run things their way. The FBI was a disorganized mess in the early days, making it kind of hard to effectively track and trap interstate criminals in cars.
I wanted kind of a realistic ending - I was doing all this random research for historical accuracy, after all - but the reality is that bank robbers and gangsters had a short shelf life. Alvin Karpis, who was probably the brains behind the Karpis-Barker Gang, managed to die an old man in Spain - he was seventy - but he's the exception. The big names ended up in prison (when Karpis was sent to Alcatraz he commented that it was like Old Home Week because he knew so many guys already there) or on a slab. I mean, it's fairly popular knowledge that Dillinger was betrayed by a Woman in Red (altho actually it was an orange skirt) and shot to death outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago, and if you look online you can find footage of the aftermath of the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde. The FBI got Pretty Boy Floyd a few months after Dillinger. Baby Face Nelson died of wounds received in a shootout not long after that. Machine Gun Kelly keeled over from a heart attack in jail.
(Wives, girlfriends, criminal associates, and not-quite-as-famous gang members sometimes survived jail and hit at least middle age. WD Jones, who ran with Bonnie and Clyde, did time, was paroled, and was shot to death in 1974. But on the flip side, Charles Mackley and Pete Pierpont, who were part of the Dillinger Gang, tried to escape from prison in the late 30s - one of them was killed in the attempt and the other was caught and later executed.)
I didn't want to cheat the ending of my story, but I didn't want to kill the boys either. So I leave it up to you to decide what happened to them.
I should mention outside the cut that while I did a lot of research and tried to be as historically accurate as possible, I fudged a couple things and made some stuff up. So if you find a historical error, yeah, that's my fault.
( If you're still curious, and you have the patience, there's more.)