'Tough guy' girls - who are our favourites?

I’m going to be talking about heroines in thrillers this week, particularly the hotshot types, those who are young enough, tough enough and crazy enough to embrace the action full-on. 

This is partly because tomorrow - after a month-long countdown during which I’ve been putting out various whistle-wetters on social media (as you can see a few paras down), the second novel in my Lucy Clayburn series, SHADOWS, will be published … Lucy being an action girl in every sense of the word.

But it’s also because I thought it would be a fun thing to lay out some thoughts regarding MY 10 FAVOURITE FICTIONAL ‘TOUGH GUY’ GIRLS, and also, even though it is something of a divergence from the main theme, because I’ll be reviewing number three in Phil Rickman’s excellent Merrily Watkins series, A CROWN OF LIGHTS. Merrily is no action hero in the traditional sense, but there’s no question that her criminal investigations are among the most intense and frightening ever put on paper (she also works well for me this month, because the small supernatural element prepares the ground nicely for a more ghostly blog around Halloween).

Anyway, as usual, that review and discussion can be found towards the lower end of today’s post. First, a couple of words about SHADOWS.

Lucy

When Lucy Clayburn first hit the bookshelves in 2016, in the novel, STRANGERS, it was quite a change of pace for me. I’d been writing the Heck series up until then, in which there was plenty of unadulterated action. When I was asked by my publishers, Avon Books at HarperCollins, to consider a parallel series involving a policewoman, I thought it was an opportunity to come back down to Earth a little, and to give my readers a more procedural-style atmosphere and a lead character, who, while tough as nails – because she’s a blue-collar Manchester lass through and through, and in her spare time wears leathers and rides a Ducati motorbike – deals with day-to-day street crime as a divisional police detective, rather than confronting megalomaniac villains whose evil schemes are mind-boggling in their insanity.

Of course, Lucy quite often gets drawn into much more serious cases, so no one needs to think that we’re content to merely do the mundane in the Clayburn books. For example, in STRANGERS, a good pinch following a random attack on a young woman late at night sees Lucy recruited to work plain clothes in the hunt for a serial killer known as Jill the Ripper (a deranged prostitute, who slices and dices her male clients rather than giving them pleasure). Likewise, in SHADOWS, more good work by Lucy, in this case her pursuit of a cash-machine bandit, sees her seconded to the Manchester Robbery Squad, an elite but rough-and-ready outfit who are hot on the heels of the ruthless Red Headed League.

And then there is the other factor, the thing I like to believe really makes Lucy Clayburn distinctive. The child of a single mum, she never knew her estranged father - until she was 30 years old and well into her police career. It was quite a shock, I guess, for her to learn that he is now a major player in the region’s overarching crime syndicate.

SHADOWS hits the shops on October 19.

Okay, and now onto our second business of the day: my love for action girls extended into a gallery of names and faces hailing from all across the fictional world. Here, in no particular order, are my thoughts and fancies on …

THE TEN BEST ‘TOUGH GUY’ GIRLS IN THRILLER FICTION

Foxy Brown

Possibly not the way female heroes would prefer to be depicted today, Foxy Brown, as played by the ultra-sexy Pam Grier in the 1974 movie of the same name, nevertheless presented the world with a central female character who didn’t just trade on her looks, but was tough, brave, and had no hesitation in standing up to male violence. The vengeful girlfriend of a murdered government agent, she literally went to war with a major crime syndicate, in the process destroying the heroin scourge that had been devastating her city.

Blaxploitation cinema was always controversial – but with Foxy Brown, it wasn’t just the race question, it was the gender question too. Critics at the time panned it for mistaking extreme violence, nudity and brash sexuality for some kind of feminist message, but it was still massively popular at the box office. On a personal note, I’ve never found Pam Grier anything less than totally watchable – and Foxy Brown is her raunchiest but toughest ever role.

Ellen Ripley

One of only two sci-fi characters to make my final list, Ellen Ripley – as immortalised by Sigourney Weaver – is probably the most immediately recognisable action heroine of all time.

The main protagonist in the first four movies of the Alien franchise (though I personally prefer the first two, as the rest were derivative and repetitive), Ripley first comes to our attention as a flight-officer working deep space cargo missions, which requires her to be a hardass every inch of the way, putting in long hours, subjecting herself to constant discomfort and dealing day-to-day with roughneck crewmen. We also learn that she’s a single mother, who endures all this to provide for her daughter. On top of that, she must battle the horrifying Xenomorph, mostly alone, and yet, often by using brain over brawn, tending to come out on top. A tired but fearless and endlessly resourceful figure, Ripley probably did more than anyone to revolutionise the way women were portrayed in hardcore science fiction. 

Emma Peel

Few female action heroes can seriously have provided hot male fantasy figures on one hand, and on the other won universal applause from women’s groups. But Emma Peel, star of the popular spy series, The Avengers, did just that.

Perhaps superficially, her character didn’t promise much. Named Emma Peel because the show was looking for ‘Man Appeal’, she initially appeared as the kittenish daughter of a prominent industrialist, who spied for a hobby, wore a black catsuit, flirted provocatively with her male counterpart, the older John Steed, and often performed the role of 1960s clothes horse, modelling all the latest fashions. And yet, the character was written so well and played with such bravura by Diana Rigg, who performed her own stunts and fought the bad guys furiously (turning the Bond thing on its head, because it was often she who rescued or defended Steed), that her character is still the main thing most people remember about that legendary show.

Annika Bengtzon

The first Scandi-Noir character to make the list, and a genuine one-off, as, rather than a detective or secret agent or soldier, Annika is a journalist and a responsible wife and mother.

Created by Swedish crime author, Liza Marklund, Annika’s is a hectic world; a nine-till-five crime reporter for Stockholm’s Kvällspressen (‘Evening News’), her career often interweaves with major issues of the day – Marklund has lots to say about current events – but she also pursues particularly heinous cases, such as in The Bomber, when she investigates what appears to be a terrorist attack on Stockholm’s New Olympic Arena, only to find herself on the trail of a maniac with a more personal grudge, in what turns out to be one of the most intense thrillers you’re ever likely to read. A rarity on this list, in that she rarely resolves problems with her fists or a gun, Annika deals with these horrors daily, and then goes home to make tea for her husband and kids – how tough a challenge is that? 

VI ‘Vic’ Warshawksi

Victoria Iphigenia Warshawski is one of the toughest fictional female characters in the crime-fighting pantheon. The creation of US novelist, Sara Paretsky, Vic is a Chicago PI of the 1980s, who, while she specialises in investigating white-collar crime, often finds herself in fist fights and shootouts with gangsters. A throwback to the Hard-Boiled era, she’s a tough-talker too, and very streetwise. But she couldn’t be anything less, having grown up in a bad neighbourhood, run with gangs after her parents died while she was still at school, got involved with ‘60s radicals during her student years, and later trained to be a lawyer, which honed off her rougher edges.

Kathleen Turner’s portrayal in the 1991 movie presented her as a hardcase, but also as stylish and breathlessly feminine, whereas in Paretsky’s original, Vic liked to dress down and was more of a fitness freak than a sex symbol. A fascinating, complex character, if you haven’t checked out VI Warshawki yet, you need to put that right.

Wai Lin

The first (and only) Bond girl to make the cut, Colonel Wai Lin of the Chinese People’s External Security Force appeared in the 1997 movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, played unforgettably by Malaysian-born Hong Kong action star, Michelle Yeoh.

Her long-standing status as a fully-trained movie martial artist had well equipped Yeoh to play a female character who had to authentically hold her own as an undercover agent and all-out warrior in the macho world of 007. But rather than simply going through the balletic, high-kicking motions, Wai Lin tempered all this with a great sense of humour and playfulness, and at the same time mostly employed skill and subterfuge to get the better of her enemies rather than simply karate-chopping her way to victory. She also stood out among the legions of Bond girls because she firmly and even amusedly resisted 007’s increasingly clumsy attempts to seduce her. One of the stand-out heroines of the Bond mythos, as voted for by most fans.  

Lisbeth Salander

Our second Scandi-Noir heroine, and the only Goth girl on the list, Lisbeth Salander played a significant role in the late Stieg Larsson’s highly influential ‘Millennium’ series (kicking off with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). After horrendous early life experiences, during which she was sexually abused, neglected and abandoned, Salander became a permanent outsider. Strange in appearance – androgynous, introverted, and possibly suffering from Asperger syndrome – she swiftly matured into one of the world’s most lethally efficient computer hackers, working as an investigator for a private security firm, but developed other skills as well, constantly able to second guess and outwit her enemies, and becoming a virtual chameleon when it came to changing her look.

Not exactly a hardcase, these abilities nevertheless enabled her to take on and defeat a range of deadly enemies, including serial killers, crooked security agents, and international crime syndicates.

Furiosa

The main female protagonist in 2015’s post-apocalyptic epic, Mad Max: Fury Road, Imperator Furiosa is the second and final sci-fi heroine to make our list, but without doubt one of the most startling. Too often, sci-fi girls have been comic-book-type superhot babes in the Barbarella mode, but there’s nothing of that sort here, despite the role being taken by the beautiful Charlize Theron. Shaven-headed, battle-scarred and fitted with an ugly mechanical arm, Furiosa appears as a military driver for desert warlord, Immortan Joe, who goes rogue when she gets the chance to save five of his unwilling concubines from a fate worse than death, and plays a leading role in all the high-speed battles that follow.

So much of an impact did Furiosa make in this astonishing, breakneck action thriller that even the titular hero dwindled to secondary status. Her unexpected presence in the movie won huge approval worldwide for what was considered a bold feminist statement.

Modesty Blaise

The only entrant on our list with an out-and-out criminal past, and to have commenced her life in a comic strip rather than a novel or a screenplay. Better known today as a mistress of many talents, an international adventurer, a mercenary, a spy, an investigator, an all-round hero for hire who is as deadly as she is desirable, Modesty Blaise, the glamorous but steely creation of Pete O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway back in 1963, nevertheless has a backstory so harrowing that it’s a miracle she emerged from it sane, let alone as a made-to-measure heroine.

The child survivor of a displaced persons camp at the end of World War II, she wandered the devastated world at first as a nameless refugee, getting involved in more and more scrapes, and learning to survive the hard way, during which process she acquired her name and many rare skills (a lot of which were initially used in crime). Too big a character to live forever in comics, it was no surprise that in due course she made her way into novels, short stories and finally the movies (three to date).

Kinsey Millhone

Another fictional heroine – the creation of top US writer, Sue Grafton – who somehow muddled her way into law-enforcement, following what might in real life have seemed an unlikely path.

Though born of wealthy Californian parents, Kinsey learned about life and death the hard way, when, as a child, she was trapped for hours in the same car wreck that killed her mother and father. Raised from that point on by an eccentric older aunt, she became a dopehead delinquent at university, but in due course found her way onto the Santa Teresa police department, where she learned basic detective-work, before finally branching out as a PI and taking on a succession of tougher-than-tough cases, capturing murderers, protecting the innocent and only evading the vengeance of local gangsters by the skin of her teeth. A smart cookie and street-tough rather than a slinky glamour-puss, she went on to star in Grafton’s much-celebrated Alphabet Mysteries.

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …

An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller and horror novels) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.

A CROWN OF LIGHTS
by Phil Rickman (2011)

Outline

When a young pagan couple, Robin and Betty Thorogood, acquire an old farmhouse in rural New Hindwell, they are delighted to discover the relic of an abandoned Christian chapel in the grounds. Immediately, they launch plans to perform rituals there and to reclaim the ancient site for the ‘old religion’ by celebrating the traditional Celtic feast of Imbolc.

But of course, it isn’t going to be that simple.

To start with, Betty Thorogood – the more tuned-in of the two – senses a dark presence in the ruin and an air of foreboding in the encircling Radnor Valley. If this doesn’t worry her enough, the couple’s plans arouse the wrath of Reverend Nick Ellis, the local evangelical minister, who has brought a hellfire message to the UK from his former parish in the American South. Despite Betty’s charm and beauty, Ellis, a man with great charisma but an increasingly sinister fundamentalist agenda, manages to stir up intense local feeling against the duo – to the point where mob violence soon threatens.

Merrily Watkins, local vicar and Diocesan Deliverance Officer, a woman very experienced in tackling the occult, is sent to keep a watch on the volatile situation. But it soon becomes apparent that this is a vastly more complex and frightening problem than even she anticipated. To start with, there are several other bizarre, possibly interconnected issues in New Hindwell: eccentric lawyer JW Weal can’t seem to let go of his recently deceased wife and may well have used nefarious, if not downright evil, methods to hang onto her soul, while at the same time Merrily is disturbed by the rumour that a circle of medieval churches dedicated to St. Michael, originally built to contain a dragon lurking in Radnor Forest, may actually have been located there to entrap a demonic entity.

Above all though, the main threat to peace in this small community stems from the Rev. Ellis, who is much more than just a zealous preacher. Merrily soon comes to doubt his motives and even his beliefs, and finds his followers – who include several local people of note, including the fearsome councillor’s wife, Judith Prosser – a particularly menacing bunch, whose strict loyalty to each other may be concealing a wealth of sins, including murder. In fact, so worried is she by this gathering storm, that she finds herself siding with the pagan newcomers, though they themselves don’t make this easy for her when a whole bunch of them turns up, determined to desecrate the ancient Christian site with their Imbolc rites …

Review

A Crown of Lights is the third outing in the hugely popular Merrily Watkins series, and for my money one of the best. Not that I don’t have a couple of reservations about it.

One key issue I have with the Watkins stories overall is the central heroine’s apparent lack of conviction. It can’t be easy for her; the loss of her husband while she was still young and the hostility she seems to face at almost every turn from her know-all teenage daughter, Jane, must leave her feeling pretty friendless at times. But even so, Merrily, while not exactly beset with doubts about her faith, is hardly the sort of muscular Christian you’d normally expect to occupy the role of exorcist. She doesn’t seem to like anything about her own Church, and nor is she easily convinced that supernatural forces exist (despite much evidence to the contrary in this series).

That said, these apparent weaknesses work in her favour in this particular outing, as the powers soon ranged against her – from all sides, both pagan and Christian – leave her more embattled than we’ve ever seen before, which quickly wins her over to the readers. You always tend to root for the underdog, especially if she gets bullied as often as Merrily does – one scene in particular, when she is unwillingly drawn into a live TV debate with a bunch of militant witches under the control of arch manipulator Ned Bain, has you on her side in no uncertain terms.

Less easy to reconcile is the other issue, which is Phil Rickman’s general reluctance to plunge fully into the world of the weird. There are several ghostly and demonic elements in A Crown of Lights, though it is essentially a clever and absorbing murder mystery, so they remain on the periphery. This is a personal viewpoint of course, but while this subtle combo of thriller and chiller has worked for some, I found the many signposts to the arcane – the ancient churches, the legends, the folklore, the prehistoric monuments with which the wild landscape is littered, the hints of a devilish presence, etc – disappointing, as there is no real fulfilment of that particular promise.   

However, this is still an excellent read.

To start with, the incendiary atmosphere in the village is hugely well handled. You wouldn’t normally expect the wintry Welsh Marches to play host to a furious war of words between fanatical religious groups, but it happens here in completely convincing fashion, the hostility simmering throughout the book until the threat of violence feels so real that you can’t help but shudder – there is surely nothing more frightening in both fiction and non-fiction than lynch-law.

It also helps to drive the narrative along that it’s such a multi-stranded mystery, which you simply have to get to the bottom of. A Crown of Lights is an intricate tale, at times almost overwhelmingly so, but it’s massively intriguing – and the reader can rest assured that it all gets tied up neatly at the end.

As always with Phil Rickman’s books, the writing is of the highest order. The gorgeous rural region is beautifully realised, its ancientness and mystery (my earlier comments notwithstanding) evoked in loving fashion. By the same token, the book is a mastery of research. The complex mythology of the Marches is brought vividly to life, while the pagan belief system is richly detailed and made to feel like so much more than silly superstition.

Most interesting of all, though, is the clash of cultures.

Paganism is portrayed as a free-spirited faith, only loosely based on genuine pre-Christian beliefs but unfettered by modernism, unlike Merrily’s ‘rational’ brand of 21st century Christianity in which the exorcist is expected to know as much about psychiatry as doctrine. And this is another key aspect of the book: the war between the old and the new – some of which rages inside Merrily, and between her vision of a kinder Christianity and Nick Ellis’s fire and brimstone, but also out in the wider village community of New Hindwell, which, though it’s hardly the back of beyond, is beset with tradition and was never likely to welcome changes enforced on it by outsiders.    

A compelling, thought-provoking novel, very, very readable and highly recommended for lovers of both mystery and mysticism.

As usual – purely for fun, you understand – here are my personal selections for who should play the leads if A Crown of Lights ever makes it to the movies or TV. Thanks to that fine writer, Stephen Volk, Merrily Watkins has already bestridden our television screens in Midwinter of the Spirit, but that was then and this is now, and only a couple of those characters play a role in Crown, so, with the exception of Sally Messham, this is a different cast:

Merrily Watkins – Rachel Weisz

Nick Ellis – Billy Bob Thornton

Judith Prosser – Catherine Zeta-Jones

Ned Bain – Hugo Weaving

Jane Watkins – Sally Messham

Betty Thorogood – Sophie Cookson

Robin Thorogood – Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

JW Weal – Robert Pugh

(I know, I know … this would be an expensive line-up, but in my imagination I have limitless funds, so yah!)

Devious, dangerous men doing dark stuff

We’re talking street-crime of the heavier variety this week: hoods, hoodlums, muggers, blaggers, gun-toting desperadoes of every sort. That’s partly because we’ve today reached the final countdown to publication of my latest crime thriller, SHADOWS – here I am, unsubtly waving the book around at the recent very successful Noir at the Wigan Bar! – but also because I’ll be reviewing Don Winslow’s epic study of a cop not just at war with the underworld, but with himself, THE FORCE.

As always, that review can be found towards the lower end of today’s column. Before we get there, in reflection of today’s chosen subject-matter, I thought I’d delve into the realms of true crime again, focussing not so much on murderers this week, as on bank robbers. Who were the worst at it, who were the most successful, who were the deadliest? Read on ...

Robbery with violence

SHADOWS is the second outing for my female cop character, Lucy Clayburn, who readers may recall completed a difficult undercover assignment in the first novel, STRANGERS, and in the process brought down a major crime syndicate and ended a serial killer’s reign of terror.

Not a bad start to her career, you may think, except that Lucy had already been in the job ten years when STRANGERS was set, and was something of a veteran, having worked the tough Manchester streets with all the nerve and determination her blue-collar background could muster. So, it should be no surprise that in SHADOWS, Lucy, though she’s only a detective constable, is now regarded as a prized asset by Crowley CID, who are not best pleased when she is co-opted onto the Manchester Robbery Squad to tackle a particularly deadly bunch of well-armed bandits, the Red-Headed League, a nickname given to them by their police pursuers mainly because of the blood-red ski masks they wear.

They are a fearsome bunch indeed. Always equipped with automatic weapons, and always leaving bullet-riddled bodies in their wake.

It’s a great gig for Lucy, who’s nothing if not a toughie, herself, and something of a biker chick in her spare time. But there is one small problem: when it becomes apparent that the targets of these robberies are exclusively criminals themselves – and not just that, but affiliates of the terrifying Manchester crime syndicate, the Crew – the stakes are raised dramatically.

The cops now know they must act fast, because it looks as if a full-blown gangster war is about to erupt …

So, as stated earlier, in honour of this new novel, which I must admit to liking very much (and which hits the shops on October 19), I thought I might focus today on some notorious real-life robbers.

They certainly occupy a strange place in the echelons of crime, these guys. In the eyes of certain members of the public, they dwell in a kind of twilight zone between villain and hero. Though undoubtedly ruthless and violent, this is counterbalanced for some by their audacity and daring. Even certain police officers of my acquaintance have expressed quiet admiration at the skill and planning that has gone into some major jobs.

The brutality, though, is something that really can’t be discounted. In English law, the definition of robbery is theft with violence, or with a threat of violence. There is no getting away from it: when someone commits a robbery, that means someone else, usually someone entirely innocent, is put in terror of injury or death, and may even suffer one or both of those outcomes.

So, I’m not going to lionise these guys, but by the same token, I’m not going to pretend that I’m not fascinated by their exploits. Here are …

FIVE OF THE WORLD’S MOST NOTORIOUS ARMED ROBBERS, AND THE ULTRA-VIOLENT JOBS THAT MADE THEIR NAMES:

Dillinger Gang

In 1933, with the repeal of Prohibition, and the end of easy money provided by bootlegging beer and spirits, America’s criminal underworld had to diversify. And so, the following decade saw a widespread return to that oldest and most traditional form of violent crime, robbing banks. 

The rural US was still in many ways reminiscent of the Old West, inasmuch as it comprised numerous small towns isolated from each other by great distances and only connected by miles of empty, often unmarked back-roads. Whereas organised law-enforcement, while relatively light on the ground in the great open spaces of the Midwest, at least had the advantage of now being motorised, the bank robbers were motorised too, and often were equipped with automatic weapons. As such, an entire host of hayseed nobodies, folk who otherwise would have left no ripple on history, became infamous overnight.

Names like Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker and her boys, Wilbur Underhill and, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, were soon synonymous with heavily-armed villainy, the objective of which was usually robbery (though sometimes kidnapping), but the regular consequence of which was blazing gunfire as the participants shot their way out of tight corners, often wounding and killing police officers, bank guards and members of the public. Despite this, most likely because of the Depression and the Dust Bowl disaster – a truly desperate time during which countless unproductive farms and other businesses were unfairly foreclosed, turning bankers themselves into a reviled enemy – these highly mobile bandits attained folk-hero status.

But none more so than John Dillinger.

A rebel since youth (a mutinous seaman in his late teens), Indiana-born Dillinger was convicted of his first serious crime in 1924, when he stole $50 from a grocery, and after being persuaded to confess by his church-deacon father, was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. Stunned by this harsh sentence, he turned his back on his father’s path, and by his own admission, determined to become a ‘mean son of a bitch’. While inside, he befriended seasoned criminal, Harry Pierpont, and studied the bank robbery techniques of a former professional criminal, German-born Herman Lamm, who had utilised military methods – casing the bank beforehand, using stop-watches to time the operation, planning getaway routes, etc – to launch a series of successful raids.

On his release in 1933, Dillinger put together his own gang of hardened outlaws and commenced a robbery spree that would pass into legend, hitting multiple banks and even police arsenals (to steal guns, ammunition and bullet-proof vests) across Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and South Dakota. Captured several times, he always managed to escape and continue his activities, chopping and changing his confederates en route (for example, he considered Baby Face Nelson a risk and so cut him loose, but admired Pierpont and worked with him whenever he could).

He successfully stole around $340,000 in total, and engaged in a number of epic gun-battles, leaving ten law officers dead and at least seven critically wounded. Dillinger himself was only believed to have killed one police officer, patrolman Pat O’Malley, during a robbery shootout in East Chicago, though this would undoubtedly, in due course, have sent him to the electric chair.

In some ways this cruel murder belies the myth, because of all the ‘public enemies’ in this era, Dilllinger – either rightly or wrongly – was regarded by the public as the most dashing. This was partly down to his good looks and affable manner with both captives and captors alike, though he is also credited with having spared bank customers during robberies, telling them that he wasn’t after their money, which won him popular support. 

Success was ultimately his undoing, when relentless FBI boss, Melvin Purvis, took up the chase with his well-armed, well-trained G-Men. Prioritising Dillinger above all others, they finally tracked him to the Biograph Theatre, Chicago, in July 1934. Ambushed on the way out, Dillinger drew his weapon, and was shot multiple times. 

   

Lufthansa Heist

Not the biggest armed robbery in criminal history, though it was pretty big by almost any standards, the Lufthansa Heist is probably most infamous for its incredible bloody aftermath and for being one of the few of its kind arranged by the American Mafia.

Much cosier in the world of racketeering, gambling and loan-sharking, the 20th century mob rarely indulged in armed robbery simply because they regarded it as a high-risk activity. And if there were any who were unsure about this, after Lufthansa they’d be in no doubt whatosoever.

However, initially it looked like a great opportunity.

The mastermind behind it was Jimmy ‘the Gent’ Burke, an Irish/American associate of New York’s Lucchese crime family and a successful thief who was always considered a safe bet (he was portrayed unforgetably by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorcese’s movie account of the crime, Goodfellas). When, in 1978, Burke was informed that millions of dollars of US currency, the result of money exchanges for servicemen in West Germany and therefore untraceable, was stored in an easy-to-break vault at Kennedy Airport, he took it to his bosses and commenced preparing what at the time looked like a hugely daring but potentially very lucrative robbery.

In the end, three major syndicates would be connected to the Lufthansa Heist, not just the Luccheses, but the Gambino and Bonanno crime families, as Burke would be contravening their respective territories and therefore owed them each a substantial cut. But the robbery itself was carried out by a team of relative unknowns, Mafia shooters and hardmen all – like the fearsome Tommy DeSimone (another searing performance in Goodfellas, this time from Joe Pesci) – but no one who might be considered indispensible.

Burke, himself, didn’t participate, but planned the raid in fine detail, and rehearsed his team mercilessly. On a frosty December 11, in the early hours of the morning, the crew, with the assistance of key insiders, infiltrated the airport holding area, abducting various employees at gunpoint and advising each one that they knew who they were and where they and their families could be found later, should anyone blab – a classic and dependable Burke tactic. Even then there were risks: had the terrorised captives disobeyed orders, and not waited until 15 minutes after the gang had left with their loot before sounding the alarm, the Port Authority Police might have been able to seal the airport in time. But the hostages had been left in no doubt that they and their families would pay dearly if the escape was impeded.

Ironically though, in the long run it was the team themselves who’d pay.

Burke (right) was stunned when the haul amounted to $6 million in cash and jewellery. It was the biggest robbery on US soil at the time, and this worried him. Knowing it would result in a high-level police investigation, which might invite disaster for the New York crime families, he promptly began eliminating those members of the team and their back-up crew, and even those who simply knew about it who might conceivably talk. Before the following summer, nine people had been executed on Burke’s orders, while several more who’d been involved would die violently over the next few years, ‘whacked’ for various indiscretions. One of these was Tommy DeSimone, who was allegedly tortured and chain-sawed in half.

Such ruthless ‘house-keeping’ didn’t save Burke. Though never convicted of participating in the heist, he was eventually fingered by notorious mobster-turned-informer, Henry Hill, in the murder of one Richard Eaton, a launderer who had skimmed some of the loot (and was hanged in a freezer truck for his trouble), and was sentenced to life imprisonment

Ultimately, the Lufthansa Heist’s fantastic pay-off was a disaster even for its senior supervisors, because it put the New York mob more squarely in police sights than they’d been for decades. Paul Vario, the Lucchese underboss who had authorised the crime, and who Hill also testified against (though for other offences) died in jail in 1988. Jimmy Burke followed him to the grave in 1996.

Great Train Robbery

Without doubt the most legendary armed robbery in British history, and probably one of the most famous in the world – but in truth, for all the wrong reasons.

In the early hours of the morning on August 8, 1963, a team of 15 London heist-men bushwhacked a Royal Mail train en route to London from Glasgow via the West Coast Line. The intention was to steal cash-bags from the HVP (high value packages) compartment, which, as the previous weekend had been a Bank Holiday in England, were expected to contain a total of several millions in cash – a staggering sum in the early 1960s.

The crime went ahead as planned, and initially seemed like a complete success, the robbers, who hadn’t even taken guns with them, getting away with £2.6 million in used and untraceable bank-notes (the mere feat of moving so much cash in such a short time was seemingly admirable, and involved the clever device of stopping the train on Bridego bridge in Buckinghamshire, where the gang formed a human chain to a waiting truck).

When the news broke, it captured the imagination of the whole country. There hadn’t been a major train robbery in the UK since Victorian times, and immediately it was portrayed in the popular press as an astonishing feat of daring. Mental images were conjured of intricate planning beforehand, of Jesse James-type bandits leaping onto the train while it was still in motion, running along the roof, and performing all kinds of heroics and derring-do. Surely, these could only be experts in the field, criminal geniuses and gentleman thieves of the old school, so sure they didn’t want to hurt anyone that they didn’t even take firearms, and yet still getting clean away afterwards, having been rewarded for their sterling efforts with a monumental haul?

But such thinking was fanciful and wildly inaccurate.

Firstly, the team, while comprising experienced thieves and undoubted London characters like Buster Edwards (right) and Bruce Reynolds (left, who led the raid), was not considered to be one of the city’s major firms, and previously had specialised in hitting soft targets. Ronald Biggs, who achieved lasting fame through his decades-long evasion of justice, was a petty-villain whose only real job was to recruit a train driver who could handle the train (in which cause, he palpably failed).

The essential inside information provided to the team, and enabling the crime to happen, came from a self-interested Northern Irish contact known as ‘the Ulsterman’ (later named as postal worker, Patrick McKenna), who took a big chunk of the poceeds and was never caught.

The raid itself, while well executed, included no real feats of daring. The train was stopped by a fake signal light, and the driver, Jack Mills, beaten with an iron bar – which was hardly heroic (and which, though no firearms were used, indicates that the gang were armed with coshes and more than willing to use them).

In addition, they were lucky. The security fixtures on the HVP carriage, which included locks and alarms, were not effective because a reserve carriage was being used, and rather ridiculously, there were no security guards on board. The retired train driver called ‘Old Stan’, who’d been brought along by Biggs (right) to move the captured train to the designated robbery site, was unable to perform his job, and so the injured driver, Jack Mills, was forced to do it, despite being semi-conscious.

The gang’s planning also fell short when it came to the getaway. Lying low at an abandoned farmhouse close to the scene, and only realising when it was almost too late that they’d be snared by the resulting police dragnet, a panicked departure meant they left several of their vehicles behind, and failed to properly clean the hideout of prints, while the ultimate final precaution, burning the place to the ground, was left to an unreliable accomplice, who never performed the task.

Errors like these, along with the tenacity shown by London’s elite Flying Squad, was the doom of the Great Train Robbers, most of whom were eventually arrested and sentenced to exemplary prison sentences – 25-30 years in most cases. Even those like Edwards and Reynolds, who fled abroad, were eventually captured and convicted.

Injured train driver, Jack Mills, suffered brain damage and never fully recovered, dying in 1970. The £250 he received in criminal injury compensation was seen as an outrage compared to the £65,000 paid to Ronnie Biggs’ wife, Chamian, when she sold her story to the papers.  

Brink’s-Mat

Committed at the Heathrow Airport Trading Estate, London, in 1983, the Brink’s-Mat robbery, which saw the loss of £26 million in gold bullion, diamonds and cash, was initially regarded as ‘the crime of the century’, and in many ways, ‘a British Lufthansa’. That latter comparison would, in due course, be much more appropriate than anyone could have imagined at the time. Because not only was the crime conceived of and executed by some of London’s most senior criminal elements, it eventually resulted in a range of arrests, convictions and lengthy prison sentences, but also a string of gangland slayings.

The raid occurred late at night in the November of that year, the crew, led by underworld tough guys Brian Robinson and Micky McAvoy, gaining entry to a warehouse containing properties belonging to Johnson Matthey Ltd. Assistance in this was provided by corrupt security guard, Anthony Black, who also happened to be Robinson’s brother-in-law, but who would later prove to be a weak link in the chain. The rest of the security team were bound hand and foot, and after being drenched in petrol and threatened with lit matches, they gave up the codes to the vault. But the robbers, who were looking for around £3 million in cash, hadn’t expected to discover the bullion, and now found themselves in possession of an absolute fortune.

Though they’d removed it from the premises in under two hours, any triumphalism the gang might have felt at the success of the operation was due to be shortlived.

Black was pressurised by the police, and in his turn implicated Robinson and McAvoy, though neither had exactly kept a low profile, both splashing money around, and McAvoy acquiring two guard-dogs for his new house in Kent, and naming them Brinks and Mat. In the end, it was a no-brainer, both men receiving 25-year sentences.

Police pursuit of the bullion was less rewarding.

To avoid attracting attention by trying to sell pure gold, infamous gangster Kenny Noye was recruited to melt it down and mix it with copper and brass. £13 million’s worth of precious metal was disposed of this way, though Noye was arrested after stabbing to death an undercover detective who was onto his scheme. He evaded conviction for this on the grounds of self-defence, the killing having happened in his own back garden, but was later charged with handling the Brink’s Mat gold and jailed for 14 years. (It was all downhill for Noye after this, when, two years after release, in 1996, he committed murder during a road rage incident, and was sent to prison for life).

Though at least £10 million of the gold remains unaccounted for, much of it still thought to be hidden and awaiting collection, it still went badly wrong for many of those connected to the crime, because the London underworld – as in the case of the Lufthansa Heist – quickly started feeding on its own. Maybe as many as 20 of those connected to the robbery paid the ultimate price, so many in fact that it became known as the ‘Brink’s Mat Curse’. This included John Palmer, a jeweller and bullion-dealer known as ‘Goldfinger’, who was gunned down in the garden of his Essex cottage, and former Great Train Robber, Charlie Wilson who’d by this time diversified into money-laundering, shot dead on the doorstep of his Spanish home, along with his pet dog.

There were other consequences from Brink’s Mat, the enormous haul said to have financed the flooding of Britain with ecstasy, which, more than any other illegal substance, is thought to have persuaded the UK’s most dominant firms that more money is now to be made from narcotics than armed robbery.

North Hollywood Shootout 

In 1995, Michael Mann successfully remade his armed robbery-themed TV movie of 1989, LA Takedown, renaming it Heat, and packing it with star power (the second Robert De Niro movie to be referenced in today’s blog, showing how on the money the great man was when it came to intense crime dramas), and pumping up the action quota massively with a much larger budget.

One of the most impressive sequences involves a bank robbery going wrong, and an immense and protracted shootout resulting between the movie’s main hoodlums and the LAPD, which sees the police overwhelmed by the astonishing level of firepower the villains direct at them, and seemingly half the city suffering demolition in the process.

It’s an amazing scene of excessive violence and rampant lawlessness, which one could thankfully never envisage occurring in real life. Right?

Wrong.

Only two years later, the Bank of America in North Hollywood was robbed by two heavily armed and armoured bandits, whose attempted escape was intercepted by the LAPD, and the ensuing shootout shocked the world, especially as it was screened live and from multiple different angles by numerous TV crews and news stations.

All of the heists in today’s blog ultimately failed, though in most cases the robberies themselves were completed successfully. This entry is the exception to that rule, but the North Hollywood Shootout was so memorable an event that it still figures highly in all lists of the most astonishing violent crimes.

The perpetrators were Larry Phillips, Jr (right). and Emil Mătăsăreanu (left), two hardened armed robbers and gun buffs, who had already killed one guard in a different job, and had become notable to law enforcement for the massive firepower they utilised, which included automatic rifles and improvised explosive devices. Known as the High Incident Bandits, by 1997 the proceeds of their crimes already topped $1 million, but the North Hollywood attack was to be the big one.

On the morning of February 28, they entered the bank, which was located on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, wearing the latest high-tech body-armour, bandoleer belts and pouches containing spare magazines and thousands of rounds of extra ammunition. Their weapons included HK-91 battle-rifles, automatic assault rifles and carbines. But such conspicuous attire was to backfire on the duo badly, when they were spotted by local patrolmen, who immediately summoned reinforcements.

Even inside the bank, Phillips and Mătăsăreanu didn’t have it all their own way. They successfully cowed the staff and customers, and gained access to the vaults, but there’d been a change in recent delivery schedules, and so only a third of the money they’d expected was to be had: approximately $300,000, though even this was rendered unusable when its dye packs detonated (above). Driven to fury, a state of mind in no way assuaged by the phenobarbital they had both taken beforehand, they responded by opening fire at the bank’s fixtures and fittings, doing wholesale damage.

Immediately on leaving, they were challenged by cops now surrounding the bank, but responded with a storm of gunfire. Officers responded in kind, but their pistols and shotguns were no match for the felons’ body-armour. To the disbelief of the everyday citizens passing by, a full-scale gun battle erupted, the robbers advancing steadily, hit repeatedly but driving the cops backwards, leaving them wounded all over the roads and pavements, and blowing their patrol cars to pieces. When a SWAT team finally arrived, 18 minutes of near nonstop gunfire had passed and yet the shootout was still raging, having caused so much carnage that the specialists’ first task was to drive in with an armoured vehicle in order to evacuate the many wounded.

However, despite appearances, the robbers were not immune. Though they fought their way into a nearby parking lot, where they were able to retrieve more weapons and ammunition from their getaway car, they had both by now been severely injured. In the incredulous gaze of the news teams hovering overhead, Philips, shot several times, attempted to escape on foot, making it onto Archwood Street, blazing in all directions before finally taking his own life. Mătăsăreanu, bleeding profusely, drove a short distance in the getaway car, before hijacking another vehicle. Unable to operate a stick-shift, he continued to put up stiff resistance, holding the encroaching SWAT men off for almost another five minutes, before, too badly wounded to shoot anymore, he surrendered – only to die from blood-loss in the ambulance.

Some 2,000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the robbers, and 12 police officers and eight civilians were seriously injured. The Medal of Valour was later awarded to 19 of the cops involved, but questions were asked about what on Earth kind of society might find itself in need of police officers who are armed and armoured like combat troops.

THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …

An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller and horror novels) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.

THE FORCE 
by Don Winslow (2017)

Outline

It’s a strange thing, but given that this epic-in-concept and epic-in-execution police thriller fills its 400+ pages with furious action, intense character clashes, crackling dialogue, emotional tangles and moral complexities that basically leave you breathless, not to mention some mind-bending ‘revelations’ about life and death deep in the NYPD, it all kicks off with an event that occurs five months before the book’s main narrative even starts, when the elite Manhattan North Special Taskforce, known simply as ‘Da Force’, pulls off a major drugs bust.

It’s the prize of prizes for streetwise Detective Sergeant Denny Malone, and his cadre of ultra-loyal sidekicks, Phil Russo, Bill ‘Big Monty’ Montague and young Billy O’Neil. Such a prize should have made their names as New York detectives forever. Except that this isn’t the way things work in this neck of the woods. The team, who naturally are corrupt to a man, stand by while Malone calmly executes Dominican cartel boss, Diego Peña, who otherwise would get in the way of their proposed theft of his product – but before they can make off with a very sizable portion of the haul, young Billy himself dies when he accidentally absorbs pure heroin through a series of fresh cuts.

These are the highs and lows of life in Da Force. They’ve lost yet another of their own, but at least the rest of the guys, who are near enough all family men, will have no problem meeting medical bills and putting their kids through college. Unfortunately, the wheels put in motion by this act of criminality don’t stop turning here; in fact, they spin faster and faster and ever more out of control.

We roll forward now to the following Christmas, and find the Manhattan North Special Taskforce freewheeling as always along the high-risk path of keeping the mean streets of Harlem clean and at the same time enriching themselves at the expense of the underworld, always cleverly – admirably so, in fact – but often violently too.

Malone is the heart and unofficial leader of this small, but very efficient crew. An Irish cop descended from a line of Irish cops, heroism and defiance are in his blood – his brother, Liam, a fireman, died on 9/11. Meanwhile, Malone’s estranged wife and kids live in a kind of safe ‘Copland’ enclave on Staten Island and are well supplied with everything they need, because though he’s a badass of colossal proportions, Malone also knows what matters to him.

Little wonder he sees himself as the King of Manhattan North, a kind of backstreet lawgiver, underappreciated for sure, but nevertheless handing down a real brand of justice as opposed to the vanilla stuff you get from the courts.

In truth, Denny Malone is a character we’ve seen before, though in my experience never quite as multi-dimensionally as he is portrayed here. He is an antihero, yes; he is brutal, yes; he is a casual user of profane and racist language, yes. But he is also brave, smart, tough and possesses bags of flawless instinct and low-key political acumen. He is also unswervingly loyal to his brother cops, and though it may seem like a huge contradiction, he genuinely believes that he is doing the right thing.

To Malone, small-scale police corruption is standard behaviour. Its proceeds are only what these men and women are owed in return for the danger and horror they face daily, and represent a small fraction of the reward they know they will never get from the uncaring power-structure above them, the one side of which is too busy acquiring privilege for itself to view them as anything other than expendable pawns in a deadly game of chess, the other side of which, politically motivated in a different way (as embodied by the likes of Black Lives Matter – yes, The Force, though a timeless tale, is a very current novel), views them as scapegoats for an unequal society, who should be made accountable for the establishment’s many sins.

Even so, street-smart and righteous though they may consider themselves to be, the Force’s cowboy lifestyle is never going to be a particularly safe option. They take a big chance with young Billy’s replacement, greenhorn Dave Levin, but the real dangers are posed by the likes of seriously dirty and very stupid cops like Rafael Torres, who are many in number (at least, they are in this novel) and who never cover their backs sufficiently, a folly for which everyone – and that means everyone! – is soon going to pay.

There is one other factor, though, which helps to blind Malone’s otherwise all-seeing eye to this very real weakness in the system: everyone else is as corrupt as he and his buddies are, if not worse.

In The Force, Don Winslow presents us with a world of law enforcement where it’s almost the norm for police officers to put things in their pockets when they attend crime scenes, to only ever hand over half of the drugs they seize, to steal stolen money again rather than return it, to tax the criminal lower orders and take bribes from those who are higher up. And it isn’t just the police. The judiciary and the political administration of the city are up to their necks in dodgy dealing as well. Everyone, it seems, resents those who have power over them, everyone thinks they are undervalued and underpaid, everyone considers that they only purloin what they are fully entitled to, and almost everyone is content to turn a blind eye to the next office along’s countless indiscretions on the understanding that this favour will be returned and the process perpetuated.

Almost everyone. 

And this is the beginning of Denny Malone’s undoing. Because though he’s constantly able to outfox the squeaky-clean but largely uninformed Captain Sykes, a crusading internal investigations unit then turns up, comprising the untouchable feds, O’Dell and Weintraub, and the superhot, supercool attoney, Isobel Paz. When this new, energised and higly powered outfit is able to implicate the ne’er-do-well cop in corrupt practises through his attempts to negotiate a crooked legal deal, there is a dramatic shift of power.

Suddenly, Malone finds himself in big trouble. He can get himself off the hook if he will serve up all his corrupt pals, but he obviously doesn’t want to do that – these are fellow cops, his blood-brothers, much closer than the kind of run-of-the-mill buddies that civies have. Through various Machievellian intrigues, he finally brokers a maybe-acceptable deal, in which he will turn over the city’s corrupt lawyers. But even more Machievellian intrigues further up the food-chain contrive to confound this.

Meanwhile, the everyday problems of cop life are also becoming an issue. There is huge racial tension in the city after a white officer shot a black kid. Major disturbances threaten while the Grand Jury deliberates, and even Claudette, Malone’s beautiful black girlfriend, wants to put distance between them both. At the same time, routine turf wars are in the offing between gangs who formerly were at peace. And then there is the uber-ruthless Peña cartel, from whom Malone stole at the very beginning of this dramatic tale. They don’t forgive, or forget …

Review

There is no doubt that Don Winslow is the modern master of the broad-canvas crime story. And yet, his material is never less than completely shocking.

While he apparently worked for months with the NYPD to gain the special insights needed to create this enormous and enormously powerful saga of right and wrong and the multiple grey areas in between, it ultimately casts the New York police in a very bad light. At times, I was gobsmacked by the open assertion that so much of the city’s towering law-enforcement, legal and political structure is bent. The innocent soul within me even came to doubt the accuracy of this, though in the long run, whether it’s a true depiction or not doesn’t really matter, because it gives us a tumultuous backdrop to this most enthralling study of a man (and his world) on the edge of an abyss.

Okay, we may have been here before. Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys is one obvious source of inspiration (Da Force do booze-ups, or rather ‘Bowling Nights’ as they call them, in the most extreme and joyous way imaginable), but I caught more than a few glimpses of The Shield as well (Denny Malone even shares Vic Mackey’s penchant for jeans and black T-shirts!), while in the character of the lovely, heroin-addicted nurse, Claudette, there was a glimpse of the doomed Isabella in Daniel Petrie’s Fort Apache, the Bronx. But really none of that matters, because The Force goes much further along the line than any of those other great pieces of work, with a unique and muscular identity all of its own. In fact, the experience of reading it is so intoxicating, so real, that you’re basically out there on the streets with the guys themselves, kicking tenement doors down, busting the ‘mopes’ and the ‘skels’.

Each page is stacked with completely convincing NYPD detail; the procedures and protocols are all there, the attitudes and language – the language has drawn some criticism for projecting a clichéd New York cop tone, and one brickbat I sympathised with took issue with the cops’ apparent belief that they could do terrible things to and say awful stuff about ethnic communities because they had earned the right – but I still found it completely compelling.

The rooting for the bag guys thing is always something of a challenge. But not here. Not because they are softened by being tough guys with hearts of gold. They haven’t got hearts of gold; but they’ve been sucked into a negative way of life almost from the word-go, which offers no ways out, and yet because it allows them to beat, cripple, blackmail and kill the city’s very worst elements – yes, the vigilante element is strong with this one! – they are persuaded that it’s all okay. And that has a similar effect on us, albeit briefly.

These guys really are the strong arm of the law, we think, the thin blue line, civilisation’s only real defence against a horde of beasts. To deal with violence, you must show … well, violence.

Hardly an ideal scenario, of course. Few of us would actually approve of it. But in The Force you at least see how it happened. In Denny Malone’s own words:

‘How do you cross the line? Step by step.’

After his emotionally-wrenching The Cartel, in which we watched a beautiful society be systematically torn apart by criminals who were more like wild dogs, The Force is a huge change of pace and direction for Don Winslow. Yes, it’s savage, hardbitten and deals with edgy characters at the sharpest end of human experience, displaying both the best of them and the worst, but whereas The Cartel was a very serious statement about the plight of a country competely at the mercy of corrupt officials and organised crime, The Force is more of a personal experience – the progress of a damaged but likeable soul forging his way through a world of darkness, and yet, though constantly seeming to do the wrong thing, gradually edging closer and closer to that redemptive moment when he finally does the right thing (oh, and with plenty of frenzied and explosive action along the way).

Read The Force. That’s all I’m going to say. You don’t have to be a fan of crime, thriller, mystery or cop fiction. As long as you don’t mind being smacked in the face repeatedly by prose as tough as Brooklyn brickwork, you should find this novel a major, major experience. 

And now, as usual, though it’s utterly pointless, I’m going to try and cast it. I say it’s pointless, because the book apparently sold to Hollywood before it was even published, and for no small fee (not jealous at all). But I’ve not heard much about it as yet, so I’m going to try and get my suggestions in first. If Don decides that my ideas are better than whoever gets the casting director gig, he knows where to send the cheque. Here we go:

Det. Denny Malone – Chris Hemsworth

Det. Phil Russo – John Bernthal

Det. Bill ‘Big Monty’ Montague – Forest Whitaker

Sheila Malone – Jessica Chastain

Claudette – Gabrielle Union

O’Dell – Ben McKenzie

Lou Savino – Joe Mantegna

Benjamin ‘Nasty Ass’ Coombes – Tyler James Williams

Stan Weintraub – John C. McGinley

Isobel Paz – Eva Longoria

Gerard Berger – William Fichtner

Det. Dave Levin – Justin Long

Det. Rafael Torres – Javier Bardem

Captain Sykes – Don Cheadle

DeVon Carter – Lance Reddick

Janice Tenelli – Michelle Rodriguez

Insp. Bill McGivern – Jon Voight

Mary Hinman – Ann Dowd

Carlos Castillo – Steven Bauer

Bryce Anderson – James Cromwell

Stevie Bruno – Michael Badalucco

Diego Pena – Luis Guzman

(I know … what a cast that would be. But then … what a novel).

Just for your interest, the two images used today that don’t actually speak for themselves, the armed robbers with the horror masks, and the gunmen emerging from the Bank of America, are lifted from two crime movies. Respectively: The Last Heist (2016), and 44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shootout (2003).