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Crime Pays Royalties: the Autobiographies of Thieves

The exploits of George Manolesco, "Prince of Thieves," from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905
The exploits of George Manolescu, “King of Thieves,” from the Pittsburgh Press, 20 September 1905

Ever since Daniel Defoe published his novel Colonel Jack (1722), readers have been fascinated by the lives of career criminals. Although, as Defoe spells out in his lengthy original title of the book, his hero “was made Colonel of a Regiment” and resolved “to dye a General,” the core of Jack’s story was the “Six and Twenty Years” he spent as a thief.

Thieves’ stories appeal to both the sinner and Puritan in us. Neglected Books fan Tony Baer describes a curious homegrown example from early 19th Century America titled Narrative of the Life of John Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison (1837):

Short, surprisingly readable, unapologetic, plain language life story of a burglar. It’s surprising to see that people were actually able to write in fairly modern American English in 1837. Mainly a series of stories recounting various crimes and time in prison. Unfortunately, he died about 2/3 of the way through the story, so the end of the book is written in the 3rd person by the warden. According to Wikipedia, and probably more interesting than any content in the book, is this factoid: “The book is most often associated with the copy in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. This copy was bound in the author’s own skin, tradition holding that Allen requested that a copy of his confession be bound in his skin and given to John A. Fenno, who had earlier resisted Allen’s attempt to rob him.”

[For the long and strange history of binding books in human skin, see Megan Rosenbloom’s recent Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.]

The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade
An early edition of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Charles Reade

The Autobiography of a Thief has been a perennially popular title, used, by my count, at least six times since Defoe. Charles Reade, who once competed with Dickens in terms of popularity with Victorian readers, took it for a short novel: The Autobiography of a Thief (1857). Reade, who was an advocate of social reform throughout his life, was careful to correct his narrator’s commentary. When the narrator writes that he “took with me three pounds ten shillings” from an Edinburgh baker after finding the work there too hard, Reade footnotes,

“Took with me.” No such thing. “Stole” is the word that represents the transactions. Always be precise. Never tamper with words; call a spade a spade and a picklock a picklock; that is the first step towards digging instead of thieving.

Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley
Cover of Jottings from Jail by Rev. J. W. Horsley.

A more authentic autobiography of a thief can be found in the opening chapter of Jottings from Jail; Notes and Papers on Prison Matters, by the Reverend J. W. Horsley (1887). Horsley, who served as chaplain at Clerkenwell Prison, collected oral histories and letters from inmates he came to know there. Horsley carefully annotated these accounts to help his readers decipher the criminal argot, such as in this inventory of the clients of a pub in Shoreditch popular with the East End’s underworld:

The following people used to go in there — toy-getters (watch-stealers), magsmen (confidence- trick men), men at the mace (sham loan offices), broads- men (card-sharpers), peter-claimers (box-stealers), busters and screwsmen (burglars), snide-pitchers (utterers of false coin), men at the duff (passing false jewellery), welshers (turf-swindlers), and skittle-sharps. Being with this nice mob (gang) you may be sure what I learned.

W. L. Hanchant later reprinted this autobiography in his 1928 book, The Newgate Garland; or, Flowers of Hemp, which collected poems, songs, and letters from London’s most notorious prison.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood

In 1903, journalist Hutchins Hapgood collected the oral history of a New York City pickpocket and petty thief in The Autobiography of a Thief. Many were sceptical of whether Hapgood’s thief was real or imaginary. He was probably a little of both. But the book was rich in details of how small-time crooks of the Bowery operated. Here, for example, is how “molly-buzzing” — stealing women’s pocket-books — worked:

We worked mainly on street cars at the Ferry, and the amount of “technique” required for robbing women was very slight. Two or three of us generally went together. One acted as the “dip,” or ” pick,” and the other two as “stalls.” The duty of the “stalls” was to distract the attention of the “sucker” or victim, or otherwise to hide the operations of the “dip”. One stall would get directly in front of the woman to be robbed, the other directly behind her. If she were in such a position in the crowd as to render it hard for the “dip,” or “wire “to make a “touch,” one of the stalls might bump against her, and beg her pardon, while the dip made away with her “leather,” or pocket-book.

Although it was never published in English, the autobiography of a thief who styled himself as royalty in the criminal world appeared in Berlin two years after Hapgood’s book. George Manolescu’s Ein Fürst der Diebe. After leaving his native Romania, Manolescu quickly developed a taste for high-end burglary and specialized in robbing jewellers and jewel owners, particularly from their suites in the finer hotels of the Riviera, Baden-Baden, and other stylish watering holes. Manolescu’s book is said to have inspired Thomas Mann’s unfinished masterpiece Confessions of Felix Krull.

Cover of I was a Bandit, the Crime Club edition of  Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook
Cover of I was a Bandit, the 1930 Crime Club edition of Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook.

Two decades later, another international thief, Eddie Guerin, recounted his adventures in his 1928 book Crime: The Autobiography of a Crook. Tony Baer describes it as follows:

Amazingly well told autobiography of a career criminal who specialized in bank robberies.

Eddie grew up in Chicago in the 1860’s to the 1880’s. He published the book in 1928 at age 67, motivated in part by a desire to counteract his portrayal by his former flame in her book published slightly earlier: Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks.

There’s plenty of adventure, including blowing the safe of the American Express building in Paris, only to be double crossed, caught and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guyana to serve a life sentence. He later escaped and returned to the States, Canada and on to London where he continued a life of crime, narrowly escaping assassination by Chicago May and her new boyfriend.

What I dug most, however, was Guerin’s ‘underworld vernacular’ (his phrase—not mine—tho I suppose I’ll steal it now from this long dead thief).

The prose is precise, hardboiled, and terse. Just how I like it. He does not tell you. He shows you. With efficiency and enough flair to entertain without being at all showy or pretentious.

What I am now quite perplexed about now is whether the hardboiled school of writing was really drawn from Hammett and Hemingway, as we were always led to believe—or whether it was more some part of the zeitgeist. There appears to have been an underworld vernacular shared by cops and robbers and hoboes and day laborers alike. A dirty realism that people spoke around that time that finally made it pen to paper in the late 20’s.

Highly recommended. A real joy to read.

Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth
Cover of Stealing Through Life by Ernest Booth

Around the same time, Alfred A. Knopf published two closely-related criminal memoirs. Grimhaven, by Robert Joyce Tasker (1928), is an account of a convicted burglar’s time at San Quentin Prison. Tasker took up writing while in prison and eventually sold a number of articles about his experiences to Mencken’s American Mercury. While at San Quentin, Tasker met another inmate, Ernest Booth, a veteran thief in for a failed bank robbery. Booth decided to try his hand at writing as well. As Tasker recounts in Grimhaven, the two men decided to avoid competing with each other:

In the end we drew up an oral compact that I would write only of prisons, and he would write only of criminals not yet in prison. We talked of the various things my experiences had taught me and decided that he should write the story of a bank-robbery, giving it every detail, with every emotion recorded.

Booth’s own book Stealing Through Life appeared less than a year after Tasker’s. With a record far longer than Tasker’s, Booth took a rather Nietzschean view of the criminal class:

There are those of us — thieves and poets — who are born intact. Complete. The stern realities of life are inverted and become only so many evidences of unreality. Within our selves we have a complete world of our imagination…. Within this realm of our own possession we retreat when confronted with things that do not fit into our preconceived scheme of things-as-they-should-be.

“We are the odd ones. The criminals, the geniuses, the builders of Utopias,” he boasted.

Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney
Cover of Angels in Undress, the US edition of Low Company by Mark Benney

In 1936, three-time convicted burglar Henry DeGras published his account of growing up in the London underworld of prostitutes and “wide boys,” Low Company: The Evolution of a Burglar, under the pseudonym of Mark Benney. Released in the U.S. a year later under the odd title Angels in Undress, the book received wildly enthusiastic reviews, including from such notoriously tough critics as Rebecca West and George Orwell. Although his publisher Peter Davies touted Benney as “the man who committed a hundred burglaries,” Benney’s crimes had been mostly minor felonies. His last conviction was for skipping out on installment payments for a phonograph. Benney went on to write several novels about the world he’d grown up in, most notably The Big Wheel, discussed here recently.

Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson
Cover of Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief by Henry Williamson.

In 1965, R. Lincoln Keiser edited the memoir of a petty thief, Henry Williamson, Hustler! The Autobiography of a Thief. A case worker for Cook County, Keiser got to know Williamson, a recent parolee from the Illinois State Penetentiary, and taped over a hundred hours on interviews which he condensed into this book. Although its cover appealed to a general audience, Keiser’s account was more sociological in nature and included commentary from Dr. Paul Bohannon, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder
Cover of Killer: A Journal of Murder, by Thomas E. Gaddis and James O. Long.

In 1970, Thomas E. Gaddis, best known for The Birdman of Alcatraz, his 1955 story of prisoner and amateur ornithologist Robert Stroud, collaborated with James O. Long and in compiling the recollections of a truly nasty piece of work, the serial killer Carl Panzram. Robberies were the least of his crimes, but there were plenty of them. As Tony Baer describes it,

Prior to his execution in 1930, Panzram and his death row guard became friends, and Panzram made a parting gift of a short autobiography, first published in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder by Thomas Gaddis, who fills in gaps in the narrative with chapters written in the 3rd person.

The first-person confessions from Panzram to be the most compelling bits of writing. He is completely unapologetic, yet recognizes his own monstrosity. He is not trying to leverage the confession for profit, titillation nor commutation. He recognizes that publication will come after death, and thus seems pretty liberated to simply tell his tale in simple unadorned prose.

The writing is lean and uses common no frills language. He does terrible things out of misanthropy and greed. But basically just feels like he’s “paying it forward” on the ill treatment he’s received from others.

Panzram was a textbook example of recidivism: “What time I haven’t been in jail I have been either getting out or getting in again,” he wrote. His coldly amoral voice is chilling:

In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God nor Devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.

Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk
Cover of The Thief, the Autobiography of Professional Thief Wayne Burk.

The Thief: the Autobiography of Wayne Burk, Professional Thief (1971), an as-told-to book written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ted Thackrey, Jr., is perhaps the most insufferably self-satisfied of all these accounts. Burk claimed to have stolen over $15 million, though that number is hard to believe after I located a few stories of Burk’s exploits, such as his 1948 stick-up of the bar at the Hotel Il Trovatore in Bakersfield, California, where he made off with a whopping $185. Burk’s moral calculus is notable for its relativity:

Nobody in this world can ever say they starved because of anything I ever did. I don’t rob poor people; they ain’t got enough money to make it worth the trouble. I never screwed around with the stock market; there ain’t no one in this world can say I make their father jump out of a window because of something I pulled with a stock to make myself richer while everyone else in the country loses. I never made a motorcar that was so cheap and crappy that it got the people who drove it killed. I never put out a medicine that crippled people or gave them cancer, and I sure never shot some poor guy just because I didn’t happen to like his looks. If I put anybody out, I had a good reason — money!

Which sounds a little like the man who boasts that he’s screwed a lot of women but never messed around with anyone’s daughter.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief, by Andrew Keith Munro
Cover of The Autobiography of a Thief by Andrew Keith Munro

Alexander Keith Munro’s The Autobiography of a Thief (1972) proved to have been a work in progress. Less than three years after writing, “I had a tremendous amount of excitement out of being a burglar,” Munro apparently found the call of adventure irresistable and was sent up for stealing £23,000 in valuables from the country home of Sir Kenneth Clark, the art historian and broadcaster.

Excitement seems to be a common theme in these autobiographies. In The Boxman: A Professional Thief’s Journey (1972), Professor William J. Chambliss’s case study of a career burglar, Harry King shares the profound observation that, “It’s exciting and I really believe that it’s the excitement that makes it appealing.”

Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton and Edward Linn
Cover of Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton with Edward Linn

The most purely entertaining of all these memoirs is the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton’s Where the Money Was (1976), which he wrote with Edward Linn after his release from Attica State Prison in 1969. Like Munro and Harry King, Sutton found the thrill of planning and committing robberies more addictive than their rewards:

Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I’d be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that’s all.

As imaginative as some thieves may be, they continue to stick to traditions when it comes to titles. When Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the 1972 Great Train Robbery came to tell his story, he called it — you guessed it — The Autobiography of a Thief (1985)

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