Dead Men's Wages: the secrets of a London conman and his family Lilian Pizzichini Picador, 267pp, £15.99 ISBN 0330484451

The title of Lilian Pizzichini's first book is taken from the name of a building-trade con that her grandfather, Charlie Taylor, regularly pulled during the Second World War. By using the National Insurance numbers of phoney navvies, he would claim income from local authorities or central government. This con is a kind of metaphor for Taylor's life; he was always up to something crooked.

The book attempts to locate the story of Taylor's life in the social history of the London in which he lived (he eventually died while on trial for a half-baked £20m currency market fraud). Taylor lived by crime and by his wits, and certainly did it with some wit. Towards the end of his life, he became obsessed with not paying for his funeral. Over and again, he would make one of his sons promise that he would "knock the undertakers. You must do it." On the morning of 24 May 1978, when he left his house with barbiturates, on which he would overdose later that day, he broke several milk bottles on the step. He said to his wife: "Don't pay the bill."

Pizzichini grew up in a family whose lives were shaped by the ducking'n'diving, wheeler-dealing of her grandfather. Born in Willesden, north London, in 1916, from a long line of pick-and-shovel Irish navvies, Taylor was, thanks to construction frauds and running illegal casinos, able to live in an elegant mansion in Kensington with the obligatory Roller, "plum-coloured", in the driveway. As a child, the author was intrigued and mystified by the glimpses she got of her grandfather's world. Twenty years after his death, while working as a freelance journalist, she decided to unearth his secrets by "piecing together the rubble of ruined lives he left in his wake".

She has worked extremely hard. Her book is at its best in showing the relationship between the development of London and the criminal opportunities that it fostered. Cities are built by government planners, builders, craftsmen and labourers whose economic activity opens up criminal niches that the likes of Taylor move into and exploit. Pizzichini is excellent at conveying the changing ecology, as it were, of London crime.

She writes well and insightfully, too. In her description of the social life of the Blitz, she says: "Everybody in London was in love because they didn't know how long they had to live." And in describing some of the habitues of the Taylor casinos, she writes: "the younger sons of great families cheated by the curse of primogeniture sought to change their luck at the roll of the dice". She also has an eye for the black humour of crime. She repeats the anecdote of what a south London tearaway, Jackie Rosa, said to the police as he died at the wheel of his crashed car: "It wasn't me who was driving."

Where I part company with her tale is in the way she describes the criminals and their crimes. This is partly because her source material is often earlier books about criminals that have dramatised, sensationalised and exaggerated their activities. She draws on the ghosted memoirs of Billy Hill, who once described himself, when giving evidence at the Old Bailey in the 1950s, as "the king of the underworld". Hill was a thief and a treacherous, ruthless thug, but he never killed anyone, nor did he run London's crime scene. He wanted to be a celebrity gangster and used the trial to throw his hat in the ring. The old-timers of 1950s crime still cringe at the memory.

What Pizzichini doesn't grasp is that London crime in the postwar years was, by international standards and compared to what we have now, a pretty tame affair. It wasn't until the 1960s, and the advent of the Kray twins, that organised crime was established in the capital. The Kray twins were themselves a couple of disorganised psychopaths who were more interested in attaining notoriety than building an under-world empire. Unfortunately, this description of Ronnie Kray, in her grandfather's hotel, is characteristic of her take on gangsters: "He spent many a long night filing the tips of his bullets so they would make a bigger hole in his enemies." Do we really need this kind of mythologising?

Writers have to choose whether to entertain or tell the truth as best they know it or can find it out. I believe that any proper journalist has a duty to do the latter, but most of us do the former. And it's easier to do it in crime than in other public spheres, as criminals seldom sue for libel. So if crime is your bag, and you like being entertained, read Pizzichini's book.

John McVicar is the author of McVicar by Himself (Artnik Media, £6) and Dead on Time: how and why Barry George executed Jill Dando (Blake Publishing, £14.99)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website