| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York. By Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson. (New York: New York University Press, 2006. x, 383 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-8147-1980-5.)
It could have come out of Hollywood. In 1923, a newlywed couple from Brooklyn—a twenty-year-old with fashionably bobbed hair and her auto mechanic husband—find themselves short on cash and with a baby due. They embark on a spree of armed robbery and banditry, with Celia Cooney, the wife, toting the gun. They take in thousands of dollars—and, at the same time, the attention and imagination of the nation.	1
In The Bobbed Haired Bandit, Stephen Duncombe and Andrew Mattson tell the story of this largely unremembered saga of crime and pursuit. The writing has velocity, and the amazing plot, with all its twists and turns, is alone worth the admission. More than just narrative history, the book is about representation—the multiple ways that the crime was reported in the New York press and "instrumentalized and mobilized" for a variety of causes (p. 7). "The stories told about the bandit were used to explain the world, to wage cultural battles, to further political interests, and above all, to sell newspapers," they explain (ibid.). To the authors, the public brouhaha over the "bandit" becomes a lens through which to view the social tensions of the era.	. . .

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