The Taking of Cloudy Mcgee

Meet Amos K. Weed, a five-foot-six bank cashier with a pathological fear of figures and grandiose dreams of criminal mastermindry. He spends his off-hours designing perfect crimes he'll never commit, then wakes up to shuffle through columns of numbers at the Lost Hills bank. When Amos gambles the bank's money on a doomed oil venture and the examiner suddenly arrives early, he turns to his only friend: the slick lawyer Ferdinand P. Putney, a lanky troublemaker in a green derby hat who somehow never quite lands in jail. Their desperate solution: recruit the notorious Cloudy McGee to stage a fake robbery, recover the missing funds, and fool the examiner. But fate, as it does in Tuttle's world, has other plans. A bumbling U.S. marshal arrives hunting McGee, chaos erupts, and what begins as a scheme to save one man's job becomes a magnificent trainwreck of mistaken identities, absurd courage, and small-town desperation. Tuttle's 1920s crime comedy delivers exactly what the best pulp fiction promises: characters you can see coming a mile away, and a disaster you can't look away from.