BULLER

Hardback. Taken from the dust jacket 'blurb' : At fifty-one, Henry Ward is happiest cultivating his roses. He lives in a neat little suburban house in Ilford, Essex, with wall-to-wall carpeting, colour TV and a set of ebony carvings he brought back as souvenirs of a trip to Africa. He had been paid to kill a man there, but he took a holiday instead. Henry Ward - known to London's underworld as Buller - has been in jail about a dozen times. He's operated in both the East and West Ends of London, among such underworld dignitaries as the Kray Brothers, Tommy Smithson and Tony Maffia. Today he runs a flourishing road-haulage business from his home. His story is fascinating on a number of levels. It gives a rare glimpse into that almost Hogarthian blend of high spirits and squalor which life in the crowded East End slums threw up even as recently as thirty or forty years ago. It is an absorbing insight into the criminal mentality - because Buller doesn't merely explain what he did but also why he did it. Above all, it is funny - black comedy, perhaps, but often hilarious - because Buller always saw the funny side in everything that happened to him, on the job, in jail, on the trot, even, unbelievably, when he was having his face sewn back on after an encounter with the Krays....His comments on prison reform are interesting and valuable because they come from someone who has seen it all from the inside. And finally the book is fascinating because he knows - or knew, because some of them are dead - all the major and minor characters on the British crime scene over the past thirty years. But what is perhaps most remarkable about his book is that every incident is illuminated by Buller's curiously individual gift as a raconteur...' With Glossary. 224pp. 8vo. h/back. With v.v. sl. browned edges o/w F. in Vg+ dw. which has the usual fading to the sp. of the blue background. Scarce.