Shirley Pitts was a shoplifter who operated in the 1950s and 60s and, when she died in 1992, was buried in a £5,000 Zandra Rhodes dress that she did not buy over the counter. Hard to imagine that any modern-day gangsters will be quite as open with any would-be biographer. Pearson was granted remarkable access to Ronnie and Reggie at the same time as they were busy posing for David Bailey portraits. The best book of the more than 50 volumes so far on the Kray twins. The Profession of Violence by John Pearson When Redeemable came out, I wrote that it was “one of the most powerful and touching books on crime and punishment I have ever read … It should be on the bedside table of every Home Office minister and anyone involved in the criminal justice system.” I stick by that.Ģ. Erwin James, who was jailed for life for two murders in 1984, is a writer who needs no introduction to Guardian readers, who will recall the articles on prison life he wrote for the paper during his 20 years inside. The former is a very powerful account by the Glasgow-hardman-turned-acclaimed-artist of his time in Barlinnie prison. I’m cheating here and naming two books because they both deal with redemption. A Sense of Freedom by Jimmy Boyle and Redeemable by Erwin James I’ll add a plea to future true crime authors: please, no more Jack the Ripper books!ġ. And putting everything in context is Judith Flanders’s wonderful book, The Invention of Murder, so I’ve omitted those from the list on the grounds that they need no introduction. Of true crime books, the most renowned of the genre are probably Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and the late Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, his account of the crimes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. And at the more organised end of the underworld are now men – they are mostly men – who are almost indistinguishable from the bankers and brokers through whom they launder their loot in what is an increasingly international and tech-savvy game. Researching my book, I attended five gang murder trials at the Old Bailey and almost all of the accused and their victims were either teenagers or in their very early 20s. What is striking is how much things have changed in the last couple of decades, in that many of those involved in territorial gang warfare are now so young. I have about 400 such volumes – the memoirs of criminals, detectives, crime reporters and the explorations and investigations carried out by authors and academics over the last 150 or so years – many of which I have been using while working on Underworld, which is a history of the last century and a half of organised – and disorganised – crime in Britain. But there has always been a small niche for true crime books, sometimes tucked – rather guiltily – below the much larger crime fiction sections in bookshops and libraries. I n recent years “true crime”, in the form of television documentaries and podcasts, has become very fashionable.
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