The Train Robbers - Piers Paul Read

Published by W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd, London, 1978.

This is the true story of the various criminals who combined to commit 'The Great Train Robbery' of 1963. We meet the main players and follow their lives as they enter the criminal world, learn why they turned to crime, and what eventually led to their decision to rob a night mail train. The life of crime is not glamourised - we learn very early on that most of their robberies don't pay off - and yet the criminals are seen in a slightly heroic manner. When everything begins to unravel following the robbery, the author points out how few things actually gave them away, and it is interesting to wonder how things could have gone differently and more successfully if the robbers had been slightly more 'fortunate'.

There are elements of this story that I find fascinating to read in a non-fiction book, elements such as fake identities, secret plastic surgeries, and corrupt cops. This gives the work an odd 'adventurous' and 'fictional' element that I find hard to reconcile with my understanding of reality (at least in the amounts that these elements appear in the events of the book). The final chapters make this even more surreal when the author (who we see approached by the robbers to tell their story early on) begins to doubt certain elements of what they have been telling him, and what we have been reading as 'fact' throughout the book.

It's an interesting way to wrap up the book, and particularly interesting when the reader considers how the author has gone against a number of fairly dangerous criminals by giving some revelations he does!

Completed 29 May 2020.

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