The Blue Suit: A Memoir of Crime

by Richard Rayner

Overview

Richard Rayner had a peripatetic childhood, and it seemed he found some sense of place when he attended Cambridge University. The study of philosophy combined with an obsession with books, however, served as the catalyst for a bizarre life of crime. Mounting debts propelled the author into a series of adventures, as he plundered bookstores for elusive first editions, forged checks, and acted as an accomplice in a Keystone Kops-like attempted bank robbery.

In a memoir that's "compelling, edgy, painfully alive" (Times Literary Supplement), like "stripped-down Dostoevsky" (Time), this is the personal story, both tragic and comic, of an absence of identity and a long checkered past of crimes and misdemeanors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623730185
Publisher:	Odyssey Editions
Publication date:	10/25/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	216
File size:	209 KB

About the Author

Born in England, Richard Rayner now lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California. His previous books include the novels The Cloud Sketcher, L.A. Without a Map, and Murder Book, as well as the nonfiction account A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and many other publications.

Editorial Reviews

In calm, precise retrospect, the pushing-midlife Rayner (Los Angeles Without a Map) limns a chilling growing-up story in which ``life was a question of surviving... of not getting caught.'' His father, a crook who disappeared when the author was a youth, shadows his life and this narrative. So when Richard, at Cambridge, was faced with a debt, he graduated from pinching books to forging checks, putting on his blue suit to approach London bankers. He dabbled in burglary and was lightly fined when caught shoplifting once. More clinical than apologetic in his flashbacks, Rayner fleshes out his horrors, adding a sometimes vicious mother to his psychohistory. He proceeded as an apprentice journalist and failed novelist in London; he consorted-even in crime-with a high-born woman married to a junkie. It was good fortune in life, not any moral epiphany, that eased him out of crime. Now in L.A. and a new relationship, he has liberated his family secrets and personal demons: ``I'm having to wring the thief out of me drop by drop.'' First serial to Granta; author tour. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

On the surface, this is the autobiographical account of a young Cambridge graduate of unprepossessing background who slips briefly into a life of crime: He steals hoards of books, his passion. These petty thefts are joined by check forgeries, which give way to breaking and entering. In a deeper sense, this is the story of a man with so little sense of self that he lives his life entangled in a web of lies and deceit. He thus describes an encounter with a young woman: "I puzzled Julie a little; on the one hand she knew I wasn't like Michael and Chrissie, but then she didn't think I was like her either; she didn't know what I was." Neither did the author, and readers are left wondering whether they do-and whether, almost 20 years later, he himself yet knows for sure. Recommended only for larger collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/95.]-Jim Burns, Ottumwa, Ia.

Library Journal

Rayner began dabbling in petty crime during his years at Cambridge University in England--stealing books, forging checks, pilfering dorm rooms, and burglarizing homes. In his rather quirky memoir, he recalls his somewhat troubled childhood (his rakish father faked his death after an embezzlement scheme) and reflects on his criminal past. After college, Rayner lived in a dingy London flat and barely supported himself with freelance writing--and petty thievery. He was arrested only once (on his release, he immediately stole another book) and has never made amends or restitution. Although he questions his former behavior, he seems more bemused than contrite. If he is as strange a fellow as he presents himself, he probably needs a few years on a therapist's couch. Be that as it may, he knows how to spin a colorful memoir.

Sue-Ellen Beauregard

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