Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun: The Autobiography of a Career Criminal

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Brutal and violent, this tell-all is a personal account of the life of Razor Smith and the world in which he lived, where ruthlessness, viciousness, and savagery are prized and admired. In prison more than half of his life for assaults and armed robberies, Smith became confined in a peculiar kind of hell from which his only route of escape was to master the art of writing. His book shows us a face of crime not often encountered in run-of-the-mill true-crime books: a face as tender and intimate as a lover's, yet ...

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A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun: The Autobiography of a Career Criminal

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Overview

Brutal and violent, this tell-all is a personal account of the life of Razor Smith and the world in which he lived, where ruthlessness, viciousness, and savagery are prized and admired. In prison more than half of his life for assaults and armed robberies, Smith became confined in a peculiar kind of hell from which his only route of escape was to master the art of writing. His book shows us a face of crime not often encountered in run-of-the-mill true-crime books: a face as tender and intimate as a lover's, yet as frightening as a killer's. Powerfully written from beginning to end, this is an extraordinarily vivid account of how a kid from South London became a career criminal, a blistering indictment of a system that brutalized young offenders, and an unsentimental acknowledgment of the adrenaline-fueled thrills of the criminal life. Shocking, fascinating, and horrifying, it also reveals Smith as one of the most talented writers of his generation.

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Editorial Reviews

Needcoffee.com
"This is straight from the horse’s mouth and as harsh as you might imagine."
Kirkus Reviews
"Like the ghost of Jacob Marley, I have spent my life carefully fashioning the chains that now bind me, link by link": a graphic, memorable chronicle of a life spent causing mayhem. Noel Stephen Smith-the "Razor" bit comes from his favorite weapon-grew up in the depressed Thatcherite England of a quarter-century past, a child of low-income housing estates and the streets. He could have been a laborer or a delivery boy; instead, he records, he took what seemed the easier way out and began robbing, fighting, stabbing. For this he spent his teendom in the last of Britain's borstals, a since-abolished hell that trained him thoroughly for a life of crime. Whereas some long-imprisoned criminals turn to religion, Smith took to the pen and, in the late 1990s, became something of a literary sensation by writing impassioned accounts of his servitude. To be sure, places like Wormwood Scrubs can't be any fun, but Smith doesn't shy from acknowledging that he had put himself in harm's way from a very early age on; there's no society-made-me pleading here but plenty of rueful remembrance. (Example: "There are many pockets of loneliness in the life of the unsuccessful career criminal . . . but none is as torturously poignant as being conveyed through familiar streets in a prison van heading for incarceration.") Elsewhere, though, Smith writes with workmanly pride of bank robberies committed, fights fought, screws put to prison screws, and escapes effected. American readers may marvel that a life sentence in England seems to translate to eight years or so, depending mostly on the mood of the nearest guard, but there's no question that Smith will be behind bars for years to come; he reckons that even withthe most lenient of terms he won't be out until 2013. A regretful, thoroughly well-written memoir that closes with these defiant words: "I never slashed a face that wasn't looking at me, and I never robbed a bank that wasn't insured."
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781556525711
  • Publisher: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
  • Publication date: 4/28/2005
  • Pages: 496
  • Product dimensions: 6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

Razor Smith has 58 criminal convictions and has spent most of his adult life in prison, where he taught himself to read and write, gaining an Honours Diploma from the London School of Journalism. He has received a number of awards for his writing and has contributed articles to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Independent, Punch, the New Law Journal, and the New Statesman.

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