Robert Murphy (2) (1947–)

A brief (though each text page has double columns of text), easily digested overview of, duh, gangsters in the London underworld from 1920 to 1960 with plenty of photographs (and line art on the first page of each chapter by Lawrence Zeegan), Smash and Grab is a decent, though by no means comprehensive, introduction to the subject that may fill in some of the blanks left in readers' minds by the crime fiction of the era it covers (particularly, perhaps, that of Graham Greene and Peter Cheney); of chief interest is the abbreviated glossary of criminal jargon, which, the reader of crime fiction is reassured to note, baffled contemporary English police, judiciary and newspaper reporters as much as it baffles him today (although some newspapers didn't bother to delve into criminal proceedings at all, as they felt that to do so would be "lower class" and endangering to their readers' morals). There is also a 12-paged timeline (titled "Diary of Criminal Events 1920-60") highlighting the main events covered in the text.

Two of the eleven chapters deal with life in English prisons in this era: useful in understanding what the criminal class in England was up against at this time, and for seeing how prison could in some sense further a criminal's career (it should be remembered that mobsters in the U.S. referred to going to prison as "going to college," and, in a sense, you weren't really a professional hood until you'd had at least a brief stint of "secondary education"). Much like the main text, however, there is only enough information to whet the interested reader's appetite, not sate it; as Murphy notes more than once that the inner workings of English gangland of the 1920s and 1930s remain impenetrable (it should be noted that Cheyney's reputedly extensive notes on the underworld were destroyed in the Blitz in 1941), much of said curiosity is likely remain unsatisfied.

Still, there are diverting bits of trivia to be had, such as the name of the first woman to have ridden a bicycle in Ireland (p. 7), the tactic of prisoners eating soap to get placed in the infirmary, as doing so would give them an erratic heartbeat (p. 65), the fact that "more ambitious" burglars turned from housebreaking to "the vaults and safes of banks, building societies, offices, cinemas and restaurants, where an increasingly large part of the nation's loose change was stored in the inter-war years" (pps. 45-6), and a tantalizing reference to Johannesburg as a home in exile for English criminals on the run in the wake of the Second World War, given that "[g]angland quarrels were lightly regarded by the South African courts" (p. 99).

Perhaps the best indication of how cursory a survey Smash and Grab is is the fact that, while the Kray twins are mentioned in passing several times, the details of their rise are beyond the brief of this book. Smash and Grab's saving grace may well be its bibliography, consisting largely of memoirs -- fictionalized to one extent or the other -- of many of the people mentioned herein on various sides of the law; Murphy notes, "Many of these books are long out of print, but in their day they were very popular and they can often be picked up in second-hand bookshops" (p. 168) -- presumably ones in the UK. American readers may wish to exhaust their local public library's interlibrary lending system and/or their local university's library before throwing hard-earned cash at these titles. Caveat lector: the 1967 title Villain by Peter Crookston is not the basis for the infamous 1971 film of the same name that nearly sunk Richard Burton's movie career (and which had a love scene between Burton and Ian McShane excised; the gangsters portrayed by Burton and McShane make an appearance in Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Vol III): Century #2 -- 1969); that movie was based on a 1968 novel called The Burden of Proof by James Barlow. One wonders if the film's producers grafted Crookston's title onto their adaptation of Barlow's novel. Then again, among the people who are the subject of Smash and Grab, "villain" was an honorific roughly equivalent to the Spanish "don": a sign that one had truly made it within his society.… (mais)