DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
You know the sort of thing, blew up big after Steven Billy ‘Andy McNab’ Mitchell scored a bestseller with Bravo Two Zero, his memoir about how he, uh, ballsed up a Special Forces mission, took on (or didn't take on) half the Iraqi army, but definitely 100% did manage to get a third of his team killed and most of them captured. Then the only one who didn't die or get (Mc)nabbed, Colin ‘Chris Ryan’ Armstrong, wrote his own version: The One That Got Away. A few years later, one of the ones who didn't get away but didn't die, ‘Mike Coburn’ (AKA ‘Mark the Kiwi’), turned in his own version of the failed patrol, Soldier Five. By this point we can confidently say that more trees died than Iraqi soldiers in the whole farrago.
Anyway, these sorts of books are often military-themed (usually with a Special Forces bent, because for some reason there doesn't seem to be much demand for unputdownable tomes of derring-do in the Royal Logistics Corps), but also encompass things like football hooliganism and (for some reason) undercover policing. If it's published by Mainstream, John Blake or CreateSpace and has a cover featuring a paunchy bloke staring straight at you like an over-pubdusted middle-aged guy cosplaying Don McCullin's GI in the mirror of the Gents at their local 'Spoons, it's probably going to count.
GBN pundit and reality TV's favourite embodiment of dad having a midlife crisis after an unexpected divorce Peter ‘Blex’ Bleksley, did a quite good one, The Gangbuster. In it he described what it was like going undercover amongst drugs gangs in the 90s whilst working in the Met Police's SO10 unit.
Then there's Running With The Firm by James Bannon, an account by a copper whose undercover work amongst Millwall's hooligan firms was turned into the film I.D.
Neil Woods produced a thoughtful book about his time doing pointless-yet-terrifying small-time drug deals in Good Cop, Bad War, and subsequently spoke out against dogmatic prohibitionism, in favour of better supporting those caught up in cycles of addiction, and calling for society to confront the conditions that can lead to those cycles.
Of course, some of them - be they about soldiers, spies, cops or thugs - are utter bilge. Of note is One Blood by Chris Penhaligon (reviewed here), an ex-squaddie who goes into private security and somehow ends up infiltrating Greenpeace on behalf of corporate bastards. He really thinks he's the good guy throughout it all (though ‘thinks’ is definitely overstating it). Confusingly the story is replicated in True Lies by Ross Slater, another squaddie who goes into private security and somehow ends up infiltrating Greenpeace on behalf of corporate bastards, with near-identical anecdotes passed off as his own. It's enough to make you think that sometimes they just make it all up...
And so we come to Black Ops by Carlton King. This busy lad managed to pack a lot in - he starts out as a mobile DJ spinning disco and new wave in northern England in the 70s, before compering for the likes of Jimmy Savile, Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson. Then he moves to West Germany, gets a gig playing to American soldiers, is hired as a store detective, joins a private investigations agency, is trained by an ex-FBI agent, is arrested by the Stasi in East Berlin, returns to England, joins the Met, is in a riot squad during Broadwater Farm, is recruited into Special Branch, becomes a firearms-trained close protection officer, then is recruited into the secretive undercover Special Demonstration Squad, infiltrates the SWP and Anti-Nazi League, foils an imaginary plot to burn down the BNP bookshop in Welling, leaves the SDS, joins the other spycop unit NPOIU, leaves NPOIU and is seconded to MI6, travels the world's dangerous hotspots as a maverick gun-toting (as he puts it) black James Bond, then returns to Special Branch, and runs security for various big cheeses, top nobs and VIPs including John Major, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, William Hague, Zhao Ziyang and, err, Des Brown. Phew! What a busy and productive life! I wonder what he's up to these days?
So, any particular examples of the genre you'd like to share?
Anyway, these sorts of books are often military-themed (usually with a Special Forces bent, because for some reason there doesn't seem to be much demand for unputdownable tomes of derring-do in the Royal Logistics Corps), but also encompass things like football hooliganism and (for some reason) undercover policing. If it's published by Mainstream, John Blake or CreateSpace and has a cover featuring a paunchy bloke staring straight at you like an over-pubdusted middle-aged guy cosplaying Don McCullin's GI in the mirror of the Gents at their local 'Spoons, it's probably going to count.
GBN pundit and reality TV's favourite embodiment of dad having a midlife crisis after an unexpected divorce Peter ‘Blex’ Bleksley, did a quite good one, The Gangbuster. In it he described what it was like going undercover amongst drugs gangs in the 90s whilst working in the Met Police's SO10 unit.
Then there's Running With The Firm by James Bannon, an account by a copper whose undercover work amongst Millwall's hooligan firms was turned into the film I.D.
Neil Woods produced a thoughtful book about his time doing pointless-yet-terrifying small-time drug deals in Good Cop, Bad War, and subsequently spoke out against dogmatic prohibitionism, in favour of better supporting those caught up in cycles of addiction, and calling for society to confront the conditions that can lead to those cycles.
Of course, some of them - be they about soldiers, spies, cops or thugs - are utter bilge. Of note is One Blood by Chris Penhaligon (reviewed here), an ex-squaddie who goes into private security and somehow ends up infiltrating Greenpeace on behalf of corporate bastards. He really thinks he's the good guy throughout it all (though ‘thinks’ is definitely overstating it). Confusingly the story is replicated in True Lies by Ross Slater, another squaddie who goes into private security and somehow ends up infiltrating Greenpeace on behalf of corporate bastards, with near-identical anecdotes passed off as his own. It's enough to make you think that sometimes they just make it all up...
And so we come to Black Ops by Carlton King. This busy lad managed to pack a lot in - he starts out as a mobile DJ spinning disco and new wave in northern England in the 70s, before compering for the likes of Jimmy Savile, Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson. Then he moves to West Germany, gets a gig playing to American soldiers, is hired as a store detective, joins a private investigations agency, is trained by an ex-FBI agent, is arrested by the Stasi in East Berlin, returns to England, joins the Met, is in a riot squad during Broadwater Farm, is recruited into Special Branch, becomes a firearms-trained close protection officer, then is recruited into the secretive undercover Special Demonstration Squad, infiltrates the SWP and Anti-Nazi League, foils an imaginary plot to burn down the BNP bookshop in Welling, leaves the SDS, joins the other spycop unit NPOIU, leaves NPOIU and is seconded to MI6, travels the world's dangerous hotspots as a maverick gun-toting (as he puts it) black James Bond, then returns to Special Branch, and runs security for various big cheeses, top nobs and VIPs including John Major, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, William Hague, Zhao Ziyang and, err, Des Brown. Phew! What a busy and productive life! I wonder what he's up to these days?
So, any particular examples of the genre you'd like to share?
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