As a writer I’ve never much liked editors. My feeling is if they knew what they were talking about, they would be writing the original copy and not just jumping into someone else’s story. (Dan Jenkins summed up every feeling I’ve ever had about editors in my favorite book, You’ve Gotta Play Hurt.)
Sometimes, though, editors are necessary evils. When I worked at the Arizona Capitol Times I had unlimited space for my stories and my writing suffered for it. Without a guiding hand I tended to run on far too long, explaining over paragraphs and in great detail concepts that could have been described in a couple of sentences.
Dane Batty’s “Wanted: Gentleman Bank Robber: The True Story of Leslie Ibsen Rogge, One of the FBI’s Most Elusive Criminals”
Rogge wasn’t writing for print; he originally was passing along stories in writing to family regarding his travels and travails as one of the FBI’s most wanted criminals. Batty, Rogge’s nephew, compiled the various stories in the computer and ended up “with an incomplete mishmash that was completely without any timeline.”
In asking Rogge for assistance with the timeline, the long-time bank robber instead rewrote some of the tales. Since there had been greater detail in the original stories, Batty merged the timeline and revised stories with the original letters and added his own paranthetical commentary throughout the book.
The story itself is interesting, not just the idea of spending decades on the run but the places he and his common-law wife visited in the United States, the Caribbean, Mexico and Guatemala. The itinerary sounds like something out of a Jimmy Buffett song, albeit with a darker subplot than the Great Filling Station Holdup.
But it’s not emotionally compelling. I found myself waiting to hear any hint of remorse or recognition that the years of stealing cars, boats and planes, of robbing banks and passing stolen cash, the shoplifting and the fraud, was morally wrong. But it doesn’t happen. In fact, at the end as Rogge discusses his final trials, it almost seems as if the reader should be sympathetic over apparent errors made by the prosecution even though he doesn’t question his guilt, like there’s a difference between being guilty and being convicted.
What hinders the book is the way Rogge’s story is told – in his own, largely unedited words. There are typos and grammatical issues and a use of exclamation points that would make US Weekly blush and leaves the reader feeling as they’ve been pounded on the head with a hammer for emphasis again and again and again.
As family, it’s quite likely Batty didn’t want to detract from the flavor of the tale by taking a heavier hand to Rogge’s portions but the writing style makes for an unnecessarily more difficult, choppy read.
For all that, however, Les Rogge’s tale remains something seemingly out of a by-gone era. His crimes feel more like those that were perpetrated by the James and Dalton gangs in the late 1800s or John Dillinger in the early 1900s. That someone could be so successful not just in robbing banks but eluding the authorities in the late 20th Century is remarkable.
Check out the official site for Batty’s book here via Nish Publishing.
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