He was the son of a Memphis insurance executive. She grew up poor near Tupelo and loved fast cars, fine clothes. They both liked a stiff drink, and together, in the summer of 1933, they crisscrossed the country, the targets of an FBI manhunt because they kidnapped an Oklahoma oilman. And though he had the brawn and she had the brains, they were finally captured at their hideout in South Memphis — Public Enemy George "Machine Gun" Kelly and his wife, Kathryn. . . >>> Their story's been told in this very magazine, but it's time to tell it again in Infamous (Putnam), the latest from Ace Atkins, the journalist turned Oxford-based crime novelist who's made a national name for himself converting the true stories of America's most wanted into very entertaining fictionalizations.

But the characters are all real. The events actually took place. Atkins' job, according to the author: to bring the story to life, have at it, bend it a bit.

How much is a "bit"? Not much in this case: the case of a Central High School grad and good-time frat-boy type, who went from bootlegging during Prohibition, to robbing banks, to that kidnapping, which made Kelly and wife Kit front-page news and the FBI, under a young J. Edgar Hoover, into a crime-fighting, headline-grabbing outfit.

Jack Ruleman of the Shelby County Archives was initially Atkins' go-to guy. It was Ruleman who showed Atkins the file on Kelly when the writer was in town researching another idea for a book. But it was the FBI's file on Kelly and Kit (a file that ran around 8,000 pages) that gave Atkins all the information he needed.

"The one thing that's different with this story ... what makes it different from the other true-crime novels I've written: This thing was covered from every angle. There's no shortage of details. This was the height of the public-enemies list. Every time George Kelly had breakfast or changed cars was documented. The FBI reported every detail: what Kelly was doing, where he'd been, how things played out. And there was that interview with Kelly when he was caught on Rayner Street off South Parkway. He just spilled it: 'Yeah, this is where I've been. This is what happened.'"

That house on Rayner doesn't have a plaque, and Atkins thinks that's a shame. "It was like the birthplace of the modern FBI," he says. "It should be a museum or something."

But it's not the only address in Memphis featured in Infamous. There's the house on Mignon near Rhodes College, where, late in the novel, Kelly and Kathryn briefly hide out with the brother of Kelly's first wife, a woman named Geneva Ramsey. It's where Kelly sees, for the first time in seven years, his two sons by that first marriage.

"George is really one of the great Memphis characters," Atkins says. Was he a typical gangster? Was he a bloodthirsty criminal?

No on both counts, according to Atkins. Kelly was in way over his head, again according to Atkins. He never killed anyone, and he may have been happiest being a bootlegger. But he was henpecked by Kathryn, a character tailor-made for a novelist — this novelist, in particular, who says he'll never have a character like her: stylish, shrewd, smart, and bent on being famous (infamous if need be).

But what drove Kelly, after a nationwide manhunt, back to his hometown: his sons, Atkins believes, and something more:

"I think Kelly knew he was going to be caught. I believe he thought he would not be caught alive. He thought it was going to end badly."

But not too badly. He and Kathryn were put on trial and sentenced: he to Alcatraz. Only, Kelly didn't live up to his reputation inside prison. Instead of "Machine Gun" Kelly, he became known as "Pop Gun" Kelly. He was — in the words of a 102-year-old man whom Atkins met in a Mississippi nursing home, a man who'd been a teller in a bank that Kelly robbed 77 years ago — a "pretty nice guy" after all.

"Hidden" Memphis: Little-known fact: One evening in 1917, a Boy Scout named Charles Wailes was fiddling with his wireless when he overheard what sounded like Morse Code. Turns out, what Wailes had tuned to was a German spy ring — headquartered in a house on Vance in Memphis.

Another fact: Neill Kerens Pumphrey, a safecracker and worse, was wanted by Memphis police in the 1920s. Headline news of Pumphrey (nickname "Popeye") apparently reached Oxford, Mississippi, where William Faulkner was finishing a controversial novel that would soon shock readers, Sanctuary. (Leading character: a brute named Popeye.)

For these and other seldom-heard stories (along with a discussion of unpublished documents by Memphis figures such as "Boss" Crump), turn to Hidden History of Memphis (The History Press) by G. Wayne Dowdy, longtime archivist for the Memphis Public Library.

But there's more this spring from Dowdy. He's followed up Mayor Crump Don't Like It: Machine Politics in Memphis with a companion volume, Crusades for Freedom: Memphis and the Political Transformation of the American South (University Press of Mississippi), a serious look at the years from 1948 to 1968 when a true two-party South emerged, African-Americans assumed local political positions, and Memphis itself adopted a more representative form of city government. M