BOOMTOWN

Prohibition-era Texas comes alive in this story of small-city corruption.

Nearly 100 years have passed since the events that inspired this book occurred, starting in the spring of 1927, in a world both foreign and familiar. Amid an oil boom in the Texas panhandle, real estate speculators took a 240-acre plot of ranch land and turned it into a sin city named Borger after one of its founders (but nicknamed “Boogertown” by local wags). Designed to separate disposable incomes from oil field workers and others attracted to the area’s promise of easy money, in about a year, Borger sprouted speak-easies, gaming rooms, boxing and wrestling arenas, brothels, and dance halls. It also earned the reputation for being the most corrupt city in Texas, drawing the ire of newly elected Governor Dan Moody, a former attorney general who had routed the powerful Ku Klux Klan in the state. The murders of three police officers (among other homicides in the span of weeks) gave Moody an in to send a team of Texas Rangers led by Captain Frank Hamer, best known for killing Bonnie and Clyde a decade later, to clean up the town. Pappalardo, a journalist and author of several books on Texas and 20th-century history, confesses up front to imagining conversations there’s no record of, explaining his creative process in footnotes. The story begins to hit its stride after about 100 pages; when it does, the pages practically turn themselves as dozens of colorful characters—moonshiners, bank robbers, corrupt deputies and town officials, professional wrestlers, a daring oil firefighter, and, of course, a bunch of tough, seen-it-all Rangers—duke and shoot it out for control of Borger’s streets.

History as if pulp writer Jim Thompson had written it.