Just Tryin’ to Make a Buck : PRETTY BOY: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd, <i> By Michael Wallis (St. Martin’s Press: $24.95; 354 pp.)</i>

Even if we had no other indications, we would know that crime has a different meaning now than it used to in America by the absence of felons elevated to a mythic status. With the possible exception of D. B. Cooper, the lonely parachutist, no one comes to mind. The idea of the criminal as gay blade, as lovable rapscallion, seems hopelessly musty. Check out your nearest urban street corner to see why.

Probably the heyday of mythification was the early 1930s, when desperadoes like “Pretty Boy” Floyd, John Dillinger, Clyde Barrow and “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer rode the highways. These killers and bank robbers took up a great deal of psychic space. Newspaper publishers and the insurgent FBI were alike in finding a use for them, or rather for the image of them as stylish, ruthless, blood-crazed public enemies. The criminals themselves, with a big assist from Hollywood, completed the work of creating their own potent images.

Charles Floyd, in a new biography by Michael Wallis, emerges as a good ol’ boy, social victim and all-around likable scamp. To the end (he died at age 30, shot down by his pursuers), he maintained that he had tried to go straight, but that “they” wouldn’t let him. “I was just a green country kid,” he told an interviewer in 1932, “that got caught on a job. . . . I guess that was the job that put its mark on me and I could never shake it off. I tried.”

One understands Floyd’s desire to craft an agreeable, guilt-free image, but one understands less easily his biographer’s submission to it. If Pretty Boy could have chosen his own Boswell (imagine the scene in his agent’s office: Floyd wants someone with Hollywood connections, thinking of the movie to be made later; his agent talks up Nicholas Pileggi, then Gay Talese, but Floyd doesn’t much like Italians, so why not go with this guy from Oklahoma, you know, what’s his name? . . . ), he could have done worse than Michael Wallis, who exhibits at every turn an eagerness to swallow the gospel according to Floyd. “We know he did some things that were wrong,” wrote the outlaw’s mother, brothers and sisters in a 1960 letter, “but not nearly all he was blamed for. . . . Yet, even the worst of us deserve justice, especially after the supreme penalty has been paid as Charley did.”

Wallis says that Floyd’s criminality grew out of the Depression. He sees it as a product of urbanization, disillusion following World War I, the Oklahoma oil boom, hard times down on the farm. Yet the Floyd family was large and resourceful, and nowhere near starving. Charley’s principal hardship growing up had to do with onerous farm chores, and he might well have turned out a good citizen like most of the others (his younger brother, E. W., was elected Sequoyah County Sheriff under the appealing banner: “He ain’t perfect, but he’s honest”).

Charley’s criminality remains a deep mystery, despite the author’s massive accumulation of detail and first-hand commentary. The very idea of interviewing the survivors of a famous bad man (they called him “Choc”) comes to seem dubious: The widow, the son, the bereaved mother and many others weigh in with opinions predictably pious and banal, and the figure of the real man, the actual outlaw, recedes.

Nevertheless, “Pretty Boy” is a rich, enjoyable book. Wallis loves his hardscrabble Oklahoma; he has dug deep with a broad shovel, and sometimes we feel that he is using Floyd’s story only as a pretext, an excuse to provide fascinating material about the Southwest.

In the course of his tale we learn about the home-distilling of whiskey (“also know as ‘white lightning,’ ‘panther’s breath,’ ‘old bust head,’ ‘tiger’s sweat’ ”); rural Southwest superstitions (“Get rid of bats by writing them a letter and sealing it with butter”); the history of the hymn “Amazing Grace” (“the basis for all (white) Southern folk music”); and Biblical references to the taking of strong spirits. Wallis vividly sketches in the history of northwest Georgia, where the Floyds lived before Oklahoma. He also provides mini-histories of Quantrill’s Raiders, Sherman’s march to the sea, Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City and Alfalfa Bill Murray, Oklahoma governor of the 1930s.

Wallis is especially good on the tradition of Western badmen to which Floyd aspired. Jesse James himself hid out in “the Nations” (the area of eastern Oklahoma, once Indian land, where Choc grew up). James’ guerrilla tactics, learned at the stirrups of the bloodthirsty Quantrill himself, strongly influenced Floyd when he came of age. Pretty Boy’s wild years, the days of daring bank jobs, hairbreadth escapes and miraculous vanishings into the countryside, owe everything to James (as well as to the Youngers, Henry Starr, Al Spencer and Emmett Dalton).

As with all great runs of luck, however, this one came to an end. Gunned down in a field of corn stubble near the town of Calcutta, Ohio, the spruce young killer became America’s most fetishized corpse for a while: “Police officers then cut Choc’s blue suit into scores of small swatches . . . (the) body was photographed. Several policemen stood behind the metal embalming table for the picture . . . a local pottery worker . . . made a deathmask.”

The funeral was the largest in Oklahoma history. Upwards of 40,000 people paid their respects, and afterward “They stripped leaves and bark off the cemetery trees. Some grabbed up handfuls of dirt from the mound of earth over Choc’s grave. . . . By nightfall, all the flowers had been taken to be pressed in family Bibles.”

The man thus interred stirs our sympathy, yet we feel as if we don’t quite know him, even after reading so much. Maybe some mysteries cannot be plumbed. Some myths roll on as before.