Pretty incredible stories. ( )

Three short accounts of various crimes, including; a lifelong bank robber and prison escapist, an author whose book reveals hints to a murder, and a man whose identity often changes.
This is a short and quick little read that is intriguing and keeps you engaged, but is overall a little forgettable. Not because of the writing, but more so the stories themselves that have more interesting anecdotes or 'fun facts' in them than anything actually worth a full story on or at least not how they are presented here. So, an entertaining quick read if you like true crime, but nothing noteworthy. ( )

"The Old Man and the Gun" is the incredible story of a bank robber and prison escape artist who modeled himself after figures like Pretty Boy Floyd and who, even in his seventies, refuses to retire. "True Crime" follows the twisting investigation of a Polish detective who suspects that a novelist planted clues in his fiction to an actual murder. And "The Chameleon" recounts how a French imposter assumes the identity of a missing boy from Texas and infiltrates the boy's family, only to soon wonder whether he is the one being conned. In this mesmerizing collection, David Grann shows why he has been called a "worthy heir to Truman Capote" and "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today," as he takes the reader on a journey through some of the most intriguing and gripping real-life tales from around the world.

An entertaining but completely unnecessary read, The Old Man and the Gun is a money-spinning movie tie-in comprising three of David Grann's true crime articles. The writing, while nothing special, delivers its information without fuss, and can be considered good examples of the craft of narrative journalism.

The topics chosen are engrossing: the titular 'The Old Man and the Gun' is the weakest, following an ageing bank robber, but the other two – a Polish writer whose violent novel bears details suspiciously close to those of an unsolved murder case from a few years earlier, and a French imposter who poses as a missing American teenager – really spark, and fulfil the old adage that truth really is stranger than fiction.

Despite this quick, readable entertainment, there's no need to pick up this book: not only were the articles previously published in The New Yorker, but all three – along with nine others not reproduced here – have already been published in the 2010 book The Devil and Sherlock Holmes. Consequently, this book seems lesser than the sum of its parts, and while Grann is a writer worth exploring, this one can be safely ignored. ( )

I enjoyed the Robert Redford film, so I was happy to see this move tie-in collecting the original New Yorker article on the shelf at the library. In addition to the story about bank robber and escape artist Forrest Tucker, the book includes two additional true-crime tales about Krystian Bala, who was fingered for a murder because he seemed to write a confessional novel of the crime, and Frederic Bourdin, a French professional imposter who went to far when he pretended to be a missing boy from Texas.

All the stories are engaging in a magazine article sort of way, compressing a lot of facts, details, and people into very small spaces. They are tantalizing, leaving you wanting a deeper dive on the subject, so I can see how the movie producers were easily able to embellish and develop a two-hour film out of a mere 30 pages.

My main problem is that reading true crime sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable. While Forrest Tucker's outlaw ways seem almost innocent, the other two stories of missing persons and murder verge on feeling a bit lurid and unseemly by not focusing more on the victims and their survivors. ( )