Dick Kirby
Författare till Whitechapel's Sherlock Holmes: The Casebook of Fred Wensley OBE, KPM- Victorian Crime Buster
Om författaren
Dick Kirby was born in the East End of London and joined the Metropolitan Police in 1967. Half of his twenty-six years' service was spent with Scotland Yard's Serious Crime Squad and the Flying Squad. Kirby contributes to newspapers and magazines on a regular basis, as well as appearing on visa mer television and radio. The Guv'nors, The Sweeney, Scotland Yard's Ghost Squad, The Brave Blue Line, Death on the Beat, Scotland Yard's Gangbuster, Scourge of Sobo, London's Gangs at War, The Mayfair Mafia and Scotland Yard's Flying Squad are all published under the Pen Sword True Crime imprint and he has further other published works to his credit. In retirement he lives near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, Kirby can be visited at his website: www.dickkirby.com. visa färre
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Medlemmar
Recensioner
Statistik
- Verk
- 18
- Medlemmar
- 68
- Popularitet
- #253,411
- Betyg
- 4.3
- Recensioner
- 1
- ISBN
- 39
- Språk
- 1
Dick Kirby who has written about the life of the late Harry Challenor who was known as The Scourge of Soho in this true crime biography helps to bring the life and times of the West End of London and inparticular Soho. This is the Metropolitan Police at one of its darkest periods, when corruption, fit ups were part of the skill set required by detectives and nowhere was this more in evident than in Soho. Quite apt when one thinks how today the landowners of Soho are gentrifying and moving some of the murkier parts out of the area. If alive today and wandering those streets he would not recognise the place that he was trying to clean up.
Kirby has researched this biography well and there is no holding back or trying to hide various elements of Challenor’s life that some may judge to harshly in today’s opinionated world. We get to see the hard life Challenor had as the child of a First World War Veteran and also his war record in the service of the SAS during the Second World War. How after the war he joined the Metropolitan Police and ended up working the Soho beat.
We see Challenor working to clean Soho up in the face of extreme resistance from many of the “faces” of the late 50s and 60s who found that he was not interested in corrupt payments and came to put a bounty on his head to get him out of their way. That bounty would never have to be paid to any criminal as it would be an anarchist cartoonist that would be the downfall of Challenor and many around him and causing many quashed convictions.
There are many questions that Met Officers of the time should be made to answer such as how with mental health problems Challenor was left isolated and allowed to pervert the course of justice. To some extent I do have sympathy with this version of Challenor and his life I doubt we will ever find the full truth but Kirby has made an excellent attempt to remove the veneer that history has left and this is an excellent book for all those fascinated by London in the 60s.… (mer)