The most recommended books about bank robbery

Norco '80 is the kind of book that sticks with you long after you’ve finished reading it.

Peter Houlahan captures late 1970s Southern California in all its strangeness and gives a blow-by-blow account of one of America’s wildest bank robberies with perfect pacing that continues to ratchet up the action page after page. The shockingly violent robbery by five landscapers whose leader was an apocalyptic born-again Christian reshaped American law enforcement.

And we’re still feeling the aftereffects more than forty years later in the form of militarized police forces across the country. It’s a book that will keep you up at night telling yourself you’ll quit reading after one more chapter but, most likely, you’ll just keep going. 

The Getaway by Jim Thompson and the film directed by Sam Peckinpah is a gritty slice of noir and the classic story of a bank heist gone wrong. It’s a beautifully pulpy showcase for the twisted marriage of Doc and Carol, played by Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw with perfection in the film. It plunges you into the very core of moral ambiguity and the ending of the book is unexpected, sublime, and a sledgehammer to the head. A great first book and film to introduce a reader to noir styles.

Harry Madox drifts into a small Texas town with a plan to rob the local bank. He soon finds himself with two girlfriends. The young, sweet Gloria Harper brings out the best in him, while his boss’ jaded wife, Dolores Harshaw, brings out the worst. This a classic noir (and one of the best) in which a man's internal struggles spill out in the form of self-destructive loves and crimes.

Williams' characters ring true, and he provides good insight into their motivations and weaknesses. Dolores Harshaw may be the best femme fatale in all of crime fiction: seductive, conniving, compelling, manipulative, jealous, ruthless, intelligent, and unhinged. "The smart thing," Madox reflects after their first tryst, "was to get out of here and let her happen to somebody else." But you know he just can't resist.

You’re fifteen years old, living unhappily with your feckless parents and unstable older sister in a small town in Montana. And then your family implodes: your parents are arrested for bank robbery and your sister flees to parts unknown. As troubling as the premise is, Canada becomes even darker and more ominous as young Dell Parsons travels alone to Saskatchewan to live with erstwhile family friends, but in fact enters a whole new world of intrigue and violence. Dell is a stoic character, and you desperately want to see his life take a turn for the better. What you get instead is a case study in resiliency and survival. Ford’s prose is powerful; every word counts, every sentence pulls you deeper into the story.

Like Dortmunder, Grimm is an idea man, and his idea for the perfect bank robbery is a doozy: he’ll dress as a clown, hold all the workers and customers in the vault, shoot out the video cameras, negotiate with the cops, take off the clown suit and makeup, “release” himself and his two accomplices as “hostages,” and waltz out of the bank and right past the entire NYPD. The only problem is, getting out of the city proves a lot harder than getting out of the bank. Cronley owes a lot to Westlake, but I picked Quick Change because he repays that debt and then some, with a smirking wit that lights up every page. 

My Clive Cussler favorite, The Chase kept me in pursuit of the villain with all the suspense and adventurous imagination I’ve come to expect from Cussler’s long line of good guy/bad guy novels. I identified with Detective Isaac Bell as I, too, once pursued bank robbers and killers from one State to another while employed as an FBI agent. In this story, Bell is put to the challenge in an audacious plot of robbery and murder. To identify this despicable felon, Bell finds that a woman plays into it adding intrigue to the outcome.

This book jumped out at me at a bookstore one day, and I loved it so deeply that I sought out the author when I learned he lived nearly and we became good friends.

Rubinstein stumbled upon a true crime story most reporters only dream of – that of hard-drinking third-string Hungarian hockey goalie Attila Ambrus, who took up bank robbing and triggered the largest manhunt in post-communist Eastern European history – and then was smart enough to let the story tell itself, bit by incredible bit.

The result is a wild ride through the chaos of post-Cold War Hungary with a rambunctious antihero for whom you can’t help but root.

For sheer delight, I give you mysteries featuring not-very-competent bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, because they use comedy to portray as well as endure a world of endemic violence. Serious stuff like organized crime is made visible and bearable to the reader by foregrounding Stephanie’s chaos-strewn friendships with walking disasters like ex ‘ho Lula. The great comic creation, Grandma Mazur (aged 70, looks 90) also drags our beloved sleuth into peril that is hilarious as well as life-threatening. This time Grandma becomes a holy terror in online gaming, a change from geriatric sex-crazed boyfriends, falling into coffin caskets, or shooting the dinner chicken. Evanovich collides the crime caper with darker textures of urban suffering. Read for comedy as a survival skill with plenty of sex, death, and doughnuts. 

I picked this book up in a charity shop, idly browsing while waiting for my elderly mother to choose a nice murder—so I think ‘unexpected’ is a good word to describe both the content and the quality. Once you get over the jarring juxtapositions, and accept the general absurdity of a middle-aged philosopher turned bank robber, occasionally on the lam, the characters (despite some distinctly unappealing attributes) become more sympathetic, and their outrageous fortunes and philosophical reflections do inspire interest in the fragmentary first recorded attempts at sustained thought about life, the universe and everything, in Europe: the pre-Socratics.

One of the biggest worries as the Civil War wrapped up was that Confederate troops might disappear into the Appalachian Mountains, where they could conduct guerrilla raids with relative impunity. As a result, the war could have been extended for years, maybe even decades, as the insurgents crept out of their strongholds to conduct hit and run raids. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Pete Longstreet reminded Southerners they lost the war. It was time to get on with their lives.

Most southern veterans accepted the situation. However, a few, like Jesse and Frank James and the Younger brothers, couldn’t accept defeat. So they holed up in the backwoods of Missouri and fought a new kind of war using tactics they’d learned under William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson.

Sound familiar? It’s the same situation that has allowed terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda to… show more.

It’s always good to have a book to read during the holidays about the holidays. This book does that and more. The main character Jane’s calamitous life feels like that never-ending Christmas song racing towards the new year. Jane is not sure she will make it in one piece. It is an easy read with lots of action and romance. Because it is divided into 12 crazy moments it is perfect to stop and start this book without having to back up and reread, you just read the next adventure.

More about hiding out and the lead-up to the final shoot-out than the bank robbery at the start, this novel is based on a real case from the 1960s. After they rob a bank in the Province of Buenos Aires, Dorda and Brigone, escape with the money over the Rio de la Plata. They find a bolthole in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country much like Argentina culturally and historically, but with fewer hysterical tendencies. Not happy about this are the politicians and police officers involved in the robbery and anxious for their cut of the loot. Piglia does a good job of recreating Argentina in the 1960s. Despite some stylistic pretensions and his overwriting of the main characters, the author manages not to get in the way of the story.