Goodbye, Miss Marple: Brits Embrace the Gangster Life

There is a new breed of celebrity on the march in Britain. They aren’t royalty and they don’t play football. They can’t sing or dance and, despite that, they’re not even in the Spice Girls. Their fame rests on one single attribute: They have all at some point in the past committed violence against another human being. Killers, torturers, fighters, robbers--their fame is based on their willingness to talk about their former exploits and the British public’s appetite to pay them for their troubles.

Step into any British bookshop, and among the usual best-selling suspects of travel, cookery and sport are dotted an ever-expanding row of grizzled countenances, normally only seen with a prison number beneath them, all advertising their life stories. Foremost among these is a book titled “Guv’nor,” British slang for boss. Its author is the late Lenny McLean, a former bare-knuckle prizefighter, nightclub bouncer and one-time murder suspect. Look along the shelves and there is the nearly identically packaged yarn of another back-street fighter and armed robber, Roy Shaw (the only man, legend has it, ever to defeat McLean), bearing the deeply ironic title “Pretty Boy.” Also here, we find “Stop the Ride I Want to Get Off,” the life story of a south London villain named Dave Courtney who has admitted to (but not been convicted of) at least two murders. Perhaps even more offensively--although one should always be wary of making jokes about a man who attacked five meat-cleaver-wielding Chinese waiters and lived--the side of his three-story house bears a mural of Courtney recast as King Arthur astride a giant white horse.

This rapidly expanding literary subgenre reflects Britain’s current infatuation with everything to do with violent criminals. The nation’s long-standing love affair with crime has switched from fiction to nonfiction, and the scene of the crime has relocated from the rural rectories of Agatha Christie to the real-life mean streets of London. “Guv’nor,” which reached No. 1 on the bestseller list the day after McLean died in July 1998, has sold 250,000 copies since its release, all in hardback, all at $24 a pop. It is on course to be the biggest-selling biography of the ‘90s in Britain, and the film rights, naturally, have already been sold.

In cinema, the phenomenal success of 1998’s gangster caper “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” (it grossed $19.3 million in the U.K. and also featured McLean in its cast) has prompted director Guy Ritchie to stay in the same fertile area for his follow-up. With the working title of “Diamonds,” that film features Brad Pitt caught up in some more bare-knuckle fighting as a priceless stone exchanges hands several times between rival sets of British criminals. It’s due for release around May, while “Lock, Stock” is being spun off into a TV series with a completely new cast, the first time a British film has ever made such a transition.

A country whose cinematic output is generally characterized by period dramas and light romantic comedies featuring Hugh Grant is reinventing itself with knives and knuckle-dusters. Next year will see the release of the film “Gangster No. 1,” which stars Malcolm McDowell and David Thewlis as rival villains fighting for control of the criminal underworld of ‘60s London. Adding extra authenticity to proceedings is cast member Jamie Foreman (“Nil by Mouth”), whose father, Freddie, was a key member of the notorious gang of that era run by Britain’s most famous criminal sons, the Kray twins.

The British criminal influence in the movies even extends to the U.S. with Steven Soderbergh’s critically acclaimed “The Limey,” which largely reworks Mike Hodges’ ‘70s British gangster film “Get Carter.”

Elsewhere, gangsters have permeated the most unlikely areas of British culture. Sculptor Nick Reynolds--son of Bruce Reynolds, another criminal, who masterminded the Great Train Robbery of 1963, at the time the biggest heist in British history--recently held an exhibition titled “From Cons to Icons” in which he displayed busts of more than a dozen famous villains cast in bronze.

Meanwhile, another gangland enforcer from the ‘60s--an era now perceived as some sort of golden age of British crime--who goes by the name of Mad Frankie Fraser is fast becoming a one-man industry in celebrity crime. His two volumes of memoirs have both been bestsellers, and he operates guided tours around London, highlighting the scenes of notorious crimes. He also plays to sellout audiences with his one-man show, in which he recalls the lighter side of torturing gangland rivals and his particular penchant for extracting teeth from his unfortunate victims. Idolizing violence and those who commit it isn’t new in itself, but the transformation of a minority interest catering to those who like their words small and their pictures big into the mainstream of British culture is certainly original. Like many other shifts in British culture, the catalyst for this change appears to have come from the U.S., namely Quentin Tarantino.

His 1992 debut film, “Reservoir Dogs,” enjoyed great commercial success in the U.K., but its cultural impact was seismic, particularly among young men. Its influence was felt immediately in the field of fashion, while its kinetic energy spawned a host of imitators and a generation of wannabe screenwriters. It influenced the new wave of British filmmaking from “Trainspotting” to “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” Building on the success of 1990’s “GoodFellas,” Messrs. White, Orange, Blond et al brought the gangster suddenly back into fashion.

Creating the climate for the rise of the reformed criminals was the startling parallel success of the so-called lad’s mag. British magazine publishing in the ‘90s has been dominated by the creation of an entirely new market: young men. Previously thought to be uninterested in magazines, this market has been dubbed the Loaded Generation, after the magazine of the same name that began the trend and set an innovative editorial agenda in which traditional, if juvenile, masculine interests such as sex, comedy, football, drinking and violence were vigorously reasserted. British gangster movies such as “Get Carter” and “The Long Good Friday” were frequently referenced, while a nostalgia that encompassed interest in the ‘60s underworld became one of the magazine’s touchstones.

The man most responsible for bringing these strands together and ushering criminals into the mainstream, however, is a former tabloid newspaper gossip columnist, John Blake. Now managing director of Blake Publishing, he signed up McLean for $750 after his story had been rejected by 14 publishers. His theory for the book’s success is simple.

“Young men, particularly working-class men, are pretty much despised by publishers,” he reasons. “If you bring out a book about a woman shagging the vicar and leaving her husband, there are a thousand out there like that, so it won’t sell. If you bring out one aimed at young working-class men, then the field’s clear. That’s what we did with ‘Guv’nor,’ and we knew straight away we had a massive hit on our hands.”

Blake’s company has cornered the market in this field, and his latest release tells the story of Nosher Powell, a boxer on the fringes of the underworld and affectionately known as the horizontal heavyweight champion of south London because of his fondness for taking a dive. Blake sees no moral problems with making these former criminals rich on the strength of their past illegal activities.

“Lenny wasn’t a criminal,” suggests Blake, a touch unreasonably. “He was a devoted family man, he was an actor, a wild man who had a hell of a childhood, overcame all the obstacles, found success and then died. That’s why people identify with him.”

Similarly, “Lock, Stock” director Ritchie sees no problem with accusations that his film might be seen to be glamorizing the lives of the rich and violent.

“I thought we’d get a lot of criticism about that,” he confesses, “but to be honest, we just didn’t. I don’t think it’s an issue, though. There’s no one really bad in ‘Lock, Stock,’ they’re just blokes having a laugh.”