Clyde Chestnut Barrow and Bonnie Elizabeth Parker made two astute career moves. The first was getting ambushed on a back road in Bienville Parish, La., on May 23, 1934, by a posse of Texas and Louisiana lawmen. Their spectacular deaths made them household names in parts of the country where their bank and gas station holdups -- for the most part, penny ante stuff -- weren't considered big news. The second was having Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway play them in a hugely influential 1967 film.

They were lucky. Without their violent demise and Beatty's film, it's doubtful that their fame would have lasted long enough to inspire two fine books on the 75th anniversary of their death: Jeff Guinn's "Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde," and Paul Schneider's "Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend."

Guinn, a Texas journalist, has researched their lives with the kind of thoroughness generally reserved for politicians and captains of industry. Barrow, "short and scrawny," and Parker, "a cute little old girl" and a borderline alcoholic, met in the Depression-ravaged campground of West Dallas, known to respectable residents of Dallas as "the Devil's back porch." Barrow was a petty criminal -- his first offense may have been poultry theft at age 16 -- before serving a stint in the Eastham Prison Farm, described by Guinn as "the filthiest hell hole in the entire corrupt Texas criminal justice system." Barrow was raped by a prisoner and took his revenge by clubbing the man to death.

Parker (4 feet 11 and perhaps 90 pounds) was an out-of-work waitress when she met Barrow, with whom she immediately fell in love. For more than four years she rode with him through a dozen states, sleeping in dingy motor courts in good times and in the back seat of stolen cars in bad. Both had a literary bent: Parker wrote poetry about their life together while Barrow wrote letters to Henry Ford praising his cars (" ... even if my business hasn't been stricly [sic] legal, it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V-8").

They saw themselves as following in the tradition of legendary western outlaws. After their deaths, a copy of Walter Noble Burns' "The Saga of Billy the Kid" was found in the back seat of their bullet-riddled car. They would have been tickled to know that their car, guns and blood-strained clothing became sought-after items for memorabilia collectors.

"Go Down Together" is a richly detailed dual biography, while "Bonnie and Clyde" is a nonfiction novel in the style of Capote's "In Cold Blood" (everything, including dialogue, has a direct source identified in endnotes). The technique sometimes results in a book a tad more literary than either Parker or Barrow deserves. At the final ambush Schneider projects himself into Barrow's mind: "Maybe you hear the first bullet fired, or the first ten, even. Or twenty. ... The other hundred and however many bullets, they're just an echo of something you remember."

The novelistic technique, though, does let his book go places a straight biography cannot go. Shortly before their deaths, the weary outlaws fantasize about a peaceful life. "Things are going to be good," Barrow and Parker tell their parents. "There will be fishing and swimming. Relaxing. Clyde's even got himself a saxophone again. A person can play 'Melancholy Baby' all night long out in those woods and no one will ever hear it."

"Go Down Together" tells you the story from the outside while "Bonnie and Clyde" presents the story the way it might been from the inside. Both leave you feeling like you just dodged a bullet.

Allen Barra's latest book is "Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee."