In this lively 2005 conversation from Tulsa, recorded the day after a Hot Kid book event at the Mayo Hotel in downtown Tulsa, Elmore Leonard and historian Michael Wallis explore the intersection of fact and fiction that shaped The Hot Kid. Wallis talks about growing up hearing outlaw tales of Pretty Boy Floyd—stories of folk heroes born from the Depression and bank foreclosures—which inspired his biography Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd. Dutch explains how he drew on Wallis’s work to capture the grit, oil money, and larger-than-life characters of 1930s Tulsa, weaving in everything from wildcatters and roughnecks to high-rolling oil men and their mistresses. They discuss the real Tulsa as a booming, reckless place, and how that backdrop birthed flamboyant “social” criminals who became public darlings. There’s also a look at the writing life: Leonard’s creation of characters like Jack Belmont, a wannabe public enemy, and journalist Tony Antonelli, who writes purposes prose for True Detective magazine. Dutch closes by teasing his next project involving U.S. POW camps and Carl Webster in the 1940s.
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