Hero or villain, detective or criminal: pulp author Jack Boyle had a choice in 1916 whether he wanted to be a good guy and crusading reporter, or a blackmailer and liar who let an innocent man suffer and a guilty man escape justice. He chose wrong. Boyle, the creator of the popular character “Boston Blackie,” could claim to write his stories of the criminal underworld from personal knowledge. At one point he was a successful reporter and editor, working for newspapers in San Francisco, often covering the police beat. He was well known in San Francisco’s Chinatown, including the opium dens and among the bars and dives of the Barbary Coast frequented by professional criminals. A gambler, a hard drinker and something of a reprobate, he became a opium addict, leading to the loss of his job and a descent into crime. He committed fraud, hooked up with a professional gang and even committed at least one brazen armed robbery. For his crimes he served terms in California and Colorado.
The career of "Midget Bandit" Henry J. Fernekes is largely forgotten today, but he rose from a beginning as a bumbling stickup man to a criminal mastermind rarely seen outside of thriller novels. In fact, it turns out that his criminal career was even inspired by popular fiction. Fernekes, a “pygmy dynamo of crookedness” according to the newspapers of the day, was a brilliant pint-size general of crime, the scourge of bank officers, police and the Pinkertons across the north east. As the head of an army of crime, he plotted and executed bank robberies from New York state to Florida to Chicago. He was known for the meticulous scientific planning of his jobs and the military precision used to carry out bank robberies. Fernekes had but a high school education and a few months of law school, but he educated himself by reading books at free libraries, becoming an expert in welding, acetylene cutting, explosives, chemistry, gas and physics. When they weren’t calling him “