Black Mask
The Courage of his Convictions. By Tony Parker and Robert Allerton. (Hutchinson, 16s.)
PROFESSIONAL criminals seem frozen in the same pattern as compulsive gamblers. Both are prisoners in a mirage—they kid themselves that they have found the quick, exciting, clever short cut to the Rock Candy Mountain. Yet both spend boring, exhausting, stupid lifetimes re- fusing to admit that they are depriving them- selves of real liberty. Both believe themselves to be members of some free elite though both, by any realistic standards of profit per man-hour, are servile mugs. They are punishing themselves for a guilt they cannot even identify.
If they were able to see the world around them clearly and objectively, they would realise that the professional criminal is an incompetent crook and the compulsive gambler a gullible sucker. The genuine collecter of other people's property goes into business. He employs the police and the politicians and the newspapers to protect his rake-off from the community. The true gambler takes other punters' bets and uses his knowledge of the odds to see that he wins whoever loses. These are the smarties and the sharpies who win the prizes from the affluent society's bran tub, with only a negligible risk of being locked away or slashed on street corners.
On any basis of rational choice, it is obvious that this second group are those who have dis- covered the most efficient way of making im- morality pay within the law. One of the most interesting revelations in this immensely read- able autobiography of an illegal villain is that `Robert Allerton' understands a great deal of this. At the age of thirty-three, he has spent twelve and a half years in prison for an income
of about £50 a week. His job as a professional crook has involved a great deal of energy, courage, hard work and brutality. He has accepted long ago as an occupational risk the outside chance that he may have to kill in order to succeed, and the certainty that lie will spend one year inside for every two on the outside. And he is inoculated against all attempts to make an ordinary three-quarters honest citizen of him whether they are based on threats of punishment, appeals to decency, or offers of more profitable employment.
Unlike most professionals, he is not a God- fearing, Queen-loving, Tory-supporting, you're- a-real-gent-guy dolt. He takes the Brechtian view that a bank director is only a bank robber who is pulling an inside job. Ee shows that he owes no debt to a society which brought him up in a slum, neglected him as a war-time evacuee, shut him away and forgot him as a juvenile delinquent, browbeat him as a conscript, and lectured and patronised him as a convict.
Tony Parker, the prison visitor who became his friend and tape-recorded his life story, asserts in his introduction that 'a criminal is neither a type nor a category.' He offers `Robert Allerton' as an individual outlaw, a Giuliano of the asphalt jungle. Like Gavin Maxwell with his Sicilian bravo, Mr. Parker is not mean with his compliments—'his honesty and directness,
his frankness and lack of pretence . his moral principles are high . . . sensitive, gen- erous, humane.' It would be Utopian to imagine that all those who rob with violence, bribe police and sleep with whores can aspire to the same high standards. But 'Robert Allerton's' value to us must nevertheless be his genuineness as a messenger from the lower depths, a tribune of the lumpenproletariat, a spokesman for the enemy within our gates. And The Courage of his Convictions is a book which forces us to reverse roles while we live within its pages, to see how our righteous platitudes read from the other side, to examine our humane pieties for signs of wishful self-glorification. With our hypocrisies and our cruelties, our corruptions and our pomposities, our cowardice and our vengefulness, we are not a pretty sight.
The book, as many reviewers have inevitably pointed out, reads like a novel or rather a col- lection of short stories. But this is exactly what made me a little uneasy about it by the time I finished the last page. Mr. Parker denies all participation except as prompter, arranger and editor. Yet rather too many of the anecdotes to my ear have the artless artiness of the trained writer. That a platonic sweetheart should passionately give herself to a man who has just shown his savagery in a bottle-fight (`the thin veneer of civilisation had slipped') would seem routine in any American tough-guy novel. To let it drop as an afterthought (`women are funny') in conversation appears a claim to he considered a natural-born Maupassant.
Here is a man who has read a lot—Grunhut, Mannheim, Radzinowitz, de Beauvoir, Durrell,
Kafka. And yet, when praising The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, he asserts with what must surely be mock-naivety—`to me he
sounds as if he must have done a lot of bird, and I mean that as a compliment.' I have a feel-
ing that it will not be, long before his plays,
novels and film scripts show that he has realised that there are quicker and easier ways of get- ting big money for interesting work than beating old ladies with pistol butts or knocking out wage-clerks with starter handles. Robert Allerton is still wearing his black mask in this auto- biography. Perhaps it will take fiction to let us
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