Product Description

The Kimes Gang is a fascinating story of youthful boys who began their outlaw ways as vagrants and thieves and graduated to bank robbery and murder. The gang's various crimes covered several southwestern states including Arkansas, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Political corruption all the way to the governor's office in Oklahoma is well researched and discussed. The main characters are brothers Matt and George Kimes but also include brothers Roy and Clyde Brandon, Herman Barker, Elmer Inman, and the notorious safecracker Ray Terrill, among others. This book reads as a virtual who's who of crime in the southwest during the 1920s. If interested in this genre, you will be riveted by this book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1031348 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 428 pages

Customer Reviews

Exciting new crime book
"The Kimes Gang" is a good new true crime book about a group of outlaws who robbed and killed their way in to history during the mid 1920s, in the State of Oklahoma primarily. This is a well documented book with footnotes and a bibliography. There are also several photo's, which I have never seen. I think this book would be a good book for anyone to read. Good job!

Shocking
This book is riddled with errors. Dates and names are wrong with many names misspelled. Just because someone uses footnotes and endnotes doesn't mean that his sources are correct. Mr. Koch should have doubled checked his sources before printing fact. I thought he would have done better than this.

Fascinating account of the Kimes Gang
I just loved this new book about a relatively unknown gang, which terrorized the southwest during the pre-depression era. Most of their activities were in Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma, but may have been as far as the west coast and into Kansas and Missouri. The author uses footnotes to show the reader his documentation to its fullest. Past reviewers have stated this was a distraction, but most scholars of any nonfictional books will want either footnotes or endnotes. Also a couple of reviewers thought the book wasted too much time on the Barker-Terrill gang, which I found to be an important ingredient to the start of the story. Many of the gangsters during this time period usually ran with each other or at the very least knew each other. So, I felt this was important and the author describes the law and lawlesness during the time period before the Kimes gang got going. This book is the first of it's kind and I feel it will be a major part of most library's ganster era section. It shold be read by others interested in this type of history. Good job!