Book review Dead Men's Wages by Lilian Pizzichini Susan Jeffreys relishes a family jaunt through London's criminal underbelly Charlie Taylor wasn't what you'd call a diamond geezer. He did not even make it into the cruel but fair league of villains, and was not (this is unknown among London criminals) even lovely to his mum, God bless her. He was a cold-hearted vicious con man with the black, lifeless eyes of a shark, who set out on his criminal career shortly after birth and died, in questionable circumstances, on Waterloo Station while on trial for plotting to defraud the Bank Of England of a million quid. As a child, he ran a bent game gambling on bus numbers; as an adult, he moved up and down the social ladder, knocking off stuff from building sites one minute, and mixing with the Aspinall set the next. Taylor
stuck mainly to the west of London, staying out of the Krays' way, running a
number of rackets and long firms from a smart address
in Kensington. In the Sixties, this was a marble-pillared gambling-den
where criminals, sportsmen and aristocrats mixed with models and beauty
queens – and lost their money. Charlie knew who owed whom, and
who owned whom; and he knew, or said he did, who the man in the mask was at
Christine Keeler's Man in the Mask Party. So,
if your bookshelves are stashed with volumes
on heists and thief-takers, scandals and conspiracies, then this volume
about Charlie Taylor's life, written by his granddaughter, will fit in among
them sweet as a nut. Not that this is your usual bit of CrimLit. Lilian Pizzichini
doesn't try to kid us that Charlie was a loveable guy just trying to do right by his
family, and that the streets of London were safe back then thanks to the likes
of dear old granddad. A
sharp-eyed child, she watched the comings and goings
in her grandfather's various establishments. He kept
mistresses under the same roof as his
wife, watched dispassionately as his sons went to the dogs, and used any member of
his family for whatever purpose suited him. It's not always easy to
tell (and not just because of Pizzichini's occasionally confusing style)
just who is related to whom in the curtained, secret world of the family home. Tracking
down granddad's story has not been an easy task. The life of a spiv and a
con man is, by necessity, not that
carefully logged, but Pizzichini has been dogged in her research,
finding old villains, getting what she can out
of family members, digging up reports on old cases and trying to
make sense of a crooked family tree. She fixes Taylor's life into his times
brilliantly, and a powerful sense of time and place runs through the book. Born
just before the First World War, and a deserter from
the Second, Taylor made little deposits of crime that
can be found throughout the
history of 20th-century London. He was a
delinquent in the Twenties, a member of the British Union
of Fascists in the Thirties, worked the black market in the
Forties, then went into property, gambling, s pivving,
blackmail, grassing and any bent business he could. Some
bribery here, dodgy building schemes there, highly paid, completely crooked
demolition work everywhere, on top of more overtly criminal activities, all helped
shape the city – and not for the better. Lilian
Pizzichini hasn't emerged unscathed from this background. Her mother had
reason to fear and loathe Charlie, yet was
drawn back into his dark web. A criminal family sticks
together, out of fear and guilt. Her grandmother could not hide
the bruises Charlie gave her and her uncle floated around
in a red kimono, greasy and unwashed, high as a kite, and frightening. It
would be cheap and easy to write this lot up as a rackety gang of
fast-living eccentrics with story-packed lives, but
Pizzichini doesn't take that route. She takes instead a
long, unblinking look at her family and the dead-eyed Charlie who created it. She
set off on her own criminal path, bunking off school,
going shoplifting, and ending up in police cells. She doesn't try
to make this sound a tough, glamorous childhood. Corruption, of the family
and society , is her theme, but there's a dark, hypnotic intensity to
her writing that would have been helped by a bit of careful
copy-editing from Picador. What with all the bunking off school to go nicking, she
clearly missed out on grammar lessons. You should know, if you
come from a criminal family, that people get hanged, not hung. |