“Extra! Extra!” three young boys and three girls with newsboy hats shouted, as they sold four-page newspapers called the Daily Bandit for five cents each. The children were present at a book party last week for “The Bobbed Hair Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York” (New York University Press). The authors are Andrew Mattson, a professor of American studies at State University of New York at Old Westbury, and Stephen Duncombe, who teaches politics and history at the Gallatin School of New York University.

The book combines history, popular culture, and the study of the press to bring to life a 19-year-old laundress from Brooklyn named Celia Cooney. In 1924, she became a sensation by robbing a string of grocery stores with a fur coat and bobbed hairstyle. Walter Lippmann and Ring Lardner wrote about her in the New York World and the New York American, respectively.

Her personality was the stuff of newspaper fodder: She liked the circus, baseball, boxing, and cooking. She also liked men who looked like Jack Dempsey. But Messrs. Duncombe and Mattson show that the press was conflicted over whether she was “a hardened criminal or a bereaved parent.”

The old New York Sun and Herald-Tribune differed in discussing how she reacted to discussing the loss of her 8-day-old child, Katherine. The baby died in Jacksonville, Fla., while her mother was on the lam. The Sun “empathetically had Celia on the verge of tears,” while “the more bourgeois Herald-Tribune” reported that the question “brought no tears” from her.

The authors also show how she sought to shape her image in the press: “She stressed that she and her husband robbed for the sake of their baby and not for earrings, gin, and jazz.” She was trying to manage her image, Mr. Mattson told The New York Sun. She didn’t like being portrayed in the press as “a hard-boiled materialist” bandit.

The flapper era and Prohibition are the backdrop for much of the book’s narrative. After 3 1/2 months of eluding the police, the bandit and her husband Edward were arrested by Brooklyn detectives in a rooming house in Florida. The bandit was later locked up in the Jefferson Market Jail in Greenwich Village.

The authors found differing narratives, depending on the social and economic class of the papers’ readers and political interests of the editors. The authors write: “Where the New York Times saw a hard-boiled criminal return from Florida, the New York Sun witnessed a broken-hearted, grieving mother, as each played to the sympathies of their own class of readers.”

The book includes a “cast of characters” such as William Seabrook, who was Cooney’s ghostwriter for her story that appeared in William Randolph Hearst’s New York American. This gives a postmodern texture to the book, as does the first chapter, in which Messrs. Duncombe and Mattson write: “We, too, are writing the story of the Bobbed Haired Bandit. Our Story is a story of stories.” Mr. Mattson told the Sun that the book explores issues that resonate today: Can criminals be rehabilitated, or do they need stronger sentences?

At the party, two grandchildren of the bobbed-haired bandit were present. But they got away, so to speak, before this reporter could meet them.

gshapiro@nysun.com