Unusual Suspect

Matthew Kerry Smith was a twenty-four-year-old revolutionary in search of a cause. He had an instinctive grasp of Mao’s maxim that political power grows from the barrel of a gun, but his theory of social transformation — inasmuch as he had one — had more in common with the putschist tactics of secretive Blanquism than with the working-class uprising predicted by Marxists. Indeed, in the pages of Nate Hendley’s The Beatle Bandit, Smith emerges as someone without a coherent political world view.

Hendley has written several true-crime books, including The Boy on the Bicycle: A Forgotten Case of Wrongful Conviction in Toronto and Al Capone: Chicago’s King of Crime. With his latest, he’s an able storyteller in possession of a good yarn: a navy veteran, with vague ideas of armed struggle, orchestrates a string of bank robberies; kills a man in cold blood; evades police on a cross-country manhunt; pleads insanity when hauled before the courts; and is...