Ghostwriting a British Gangster's Memoir
“he hospitalized a teenage would-be burglar with a claw hammer”
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My father in law was once courted by violent men. As a publisher, all kinds of exotic characters sought him out with their stories, and for a time, it was gangsters.
During this particular phase of his career, one especially enthusiastic local villain needed help with a second memoir of blood-spattered nostalgia. At the time, my wife and I had just bought our first house and we had never been poorer. Her father asked me if I was interested in writing the memoir. His own brushes with the underworld from previous publications had led to some hairy incidents, which he had no wish to repeat. I, on the other hand, was a little more desperate.
Ghostwriting was a new experience for me. Writing a book was, and it might have been, fun if I hadn’t been selling that particular virginal part of my brain to a scowling old man with scores that he wanted to settle in public, and with brutal rhetoric. At the time I was working on a couple of screenplays that were proving slippery and misery-inducing. If writing wasn’t going to be rewarding, I decided, it might as well be a little bit lucrative.
The three of us arranged to meet at a restaurant. The gangster, it turned out, was a safecracker who was in his 70s and quite short, but blonde and fierce enough to pass for much younger. His muscular neck was broader than his jaw, which was also quite toned. Even his eyebrows seemed muscled, arching into suspicious Vs at the slightest provocation.
A deal was struck and the project began, our meetings quickly settling into a routine. He would wait for me in his black Mercedes at the small windswept railway platform of the village where he lived. Then we would park up and tour his favorite places, visiting the girls in the tanning parlor who he flirted with, and the old women in the pie shop who he also flirted with, before settling down in a café. On one occasion, he took me to his flat, the decor of which still hadn’t quite decided what it wanted to be. Half of it was all naked plaster and exposed wires, the other half Miami Vice mirrors and black leather. The front door had a great many locks. Wherever we went, I would be gripping a bag of pies he had bought me as a gift.
The main focus of the story was the time he was tortured for several days by men who believed him responsible for murdering one of their friends. He had been cleared of the charge in court, but not everyone agreed with the decision, apparently. More than once he dropped hints that he had actually done it, or at least was capable of it, before reassuring me that he hadn’t. Sometimes he bounced between the two alternate realities mid-sentence, as if being innocent of murder was a touch effeminate. He wore the stigma well, as much as he wished to purge himself of it.
He described at length how he was beaten and burned, and I sat and scribbled it all down. He also told me many times how he was not just innocent of that shooting, but a completely legitimate businessman these days. This second book was to be his way of setting the record even straighter in that regard. Of course, no matter how straight we set it, he couldn't resist giving it a crooked kink occasionally, just to remind everyone (and himself) who he really was.
At one point he described to me how he hospitalized a teenage would-be burglar with a claw hammer. He had caught the teen wriggling into an old woman’s house. Justice was very important to him, and he took great pains to identify the difference between good or honorable crimes and bad ones. It’s probably a similar distinction to the one I make when awkwardly explaining to someone the difference between the things I have written for love, and the things I have written for money.
Sometimes he would call me at home with some random detail he had just thought of that he wanted to include in the memoir. It was annoying and stressful, but we were collaborators. I may have been a surrogate, but it was still our baby.
When our book was almost finished, he took me to the bank to withdraw the last part of my fee. He grumbled and seemed put out, as if suddenly sensing that he himself was being robbed. As we stood in the queue, he began alluding to money problems, and at one point mumbled something about a missing cigarette truck under his breath. When my own eyebrows began to arch, he trailed off, thinking better of it.
The money he gave me I spent on a floor for our kitchen, and a new phone with a different number. We moved away a long time ago, but the memory of that book still materializes now and then, hazy and spectral, to torment me.
A few months after we had finished, my father in law told me that the book had found a home with a publishing house in London that specialized in that kind of thing. Some time after that, I heard that my old collaborator was on the hunt for someone to help him write another one.
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