A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, by Razor Smith

Do monstrous acts make a man a monster?

There are few queasier shelves in the bookshop than that labelled "True Crime". While criminal memoirs may not be the worst offenders, they routinely trade in absurd posturing and self-justifications, above and beyond the call of gratuitous violence. In such company, this "autobiography of a career criminal" looks positively saintly.

There are few queasier shelves in the bookshop than that labelled "True Crime". While criminal memoirs may not be the worst offenders, they routinely trade in absurd posturing and self-justifications, above and beyond the call of gratuitous violence. In such company, this "autobiography of a career criminal" looks positively saintly.

It's the con in question's own work, written during an ongoing 17-year stretch for armed robbery - not bad for a borstal-raised thug more used to handling a Gillette bayonet (a razor blade melted into a toothbrush handle) than a pen. Noel "Razor" Smith pitches his book both as therapeutic exercise, helping him to accept responsibility for his actions, and as an indictment of a system that never gave him a chance.

Reconciling these two goals is his biggest problem. Most readers of this newspaper will be happy to buy the idea that educating prisoners, rather than throwing away the key, can turn them into successful authors. It might come as a disappointment to learn that being published in a liberal broadsheet doesn't stop you wielding an eight-inch dagger in a prison gang war, or victimising sex-offenders.

Smith convincingly portrays the borstals of the 1970s as hellholes that could have been designed expressly to turn out highly-trained delinquents. Nevertheless, you can't help feeling that he is pushing it when he attributes a life of sometimes sickeningly bloody criminality to a single formative incident. Coming from a rough but honest family, south London out of north Dublin, he claims he was up to nothing more than petty thieving and "sponsored swim" scams until, aged 14, he was picked up by a van-load of CID officers, badly beaten, and fitted up for burglary. All the rest could not but follow.

The slashings and stabbings that do follow testify against this. They also make the writing repetitive and lumpy with cliché. Hate is forever "bubbling over", something inside forever "snapping".

Once you get through the ugly punks vs. rockers wars of the late 1970s, and he embarks on his sometimes flamboyant career of armed robbery, his handle on who he was, and why he did what he did, improve immensely. Smith knows full well that detailed breakdowns of how to rob a bank, together with comical examples of how not to do it - not to mention a few nods to Mad Frank, Charley Bronson and good old Kenny Noye - will pull in more readers than any denunciation of Michael Howard's penal reforms.

"I am not a monster," he says, "but I have done some monstrous things along the way." It is this trick - as if knowing, or inventing, the difference between them absolves him of all of it - that makes the book such a morally dubious proposition. Writing it may have helped make Smith a better person. Reading it is not guaranteed to do the same for you.