Thieves Like Us A Novel Author:Edward Anderson Somewhere between the hardboiled dialogue of Dashiell Hammett and the dustbowl poetry of John Steinbeck lies the doomed romanticism of Edward Anderson's Thieves Like Us. When three small-time gangsters break out of jail, they return to the only life they know--small-town bank robbing. And when the youngest of them falls in love with one o... more »f the older gangster's cousins, it becomes a classic tale of love on the run. Thieves Like Us was powerfully adapted for the screen by Nicholas Ray in 1948 as They Live By Night and again in 1973, under its original title, by Robert Altman.« less