THE CAMBIO KILLING

In a superb example of British crime noir, Peter Kinsley’s fast-paced, gutsy thriller starts off on the Spanish Riviera – popular with tourists, bolthole for criminals, and packed solid with British pound notes...
And at the end of the holiday season, all that money needed to come home, on a plane, and for small-time villains, brothers Jack and Toby Smith, that was temptation. Their last job – their pension for the future.
It was to be the biggest job ever, a two million pounds heist – clean money, all cash. The perfect job. No guns, no violence, just a beautifully executed sting. But every sting has its tale...
In the murky world of London blaggers, Jimmy McNab was known as a hard man. Every scar told a story, but none of them squealed, so Superintendent Slight of the Sweeney kept schtum when McNab offered to be a supergrass – he’d crack these gangs now.
And Jack Smith bided his time, planned every little detail, sipped his beer, and waited for his chance to come. Jumbos full of cash don’t fly by every day. But Jack Smith was planning rather more than just a robbery… he had an old score to settle.
In the grand tradition of The Italian Job and Jules Dassin’s Riffifi, Peter Kinsley’s tense thriller resonates with superb detail, and the actual heist on the plane is nail-bitingly dramatic.
The author uses his own background as an investigative Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter in Fleet Street to write an incredibly detailed account of how the criminals and the Flying Squad work, and their interaction with each other. Peter Kinsley’s writing provides us with real insight into the characters of the main protagonists as this drama unfolds.
His first novel, Three Cheers for Nothing – concerning the theft of the Crown Jewels by Jonathan Cheers, who inhabits the model whale in the Natural History Museum in London – was bought by United Artists for John Schlesinger, who finally decided to make Midnight Cowboy instead, as he wanted to work in America.
There followed more comedy and adventure, and five highly-praised volumes of memoirs.
Although The Cambio Killing has been written as a fictional story, all the facts are from actual criminal cases, and the characters are based on people he has met.
He wrote the first book about the Yorkshire Ripper – entitled I’m Jack, The Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper with a colleague, Frank Smyth – which was published by Pan Books before Sutcliffe was caught.

Peter Kinsley is a master storyteller.

Price: £16.99

Reviews

"In The Cambio Killing, Peter Kinsley displays expert knowledge of how to commit a £2,000,000 airline heist and how not to catch the thieves. This is a frankly appalling, delightfully immoral tale of criminal ingenuity and police ineptitude. Kinsley deploys masterly command of the picturesque argot of the London underworld, and knows the procedures on both sides of the law. He seems to achieve perfect-pitch verisimilitude, though he claims never to have done time in the nick or the Metropolitan Police — only in the pubs on the scenes of the London crime beat."
Patrick Skene Catling

TO CATCH A PAEDOPHILE

Paedophilia – a curse of our times – a dark stain that lies dormant in the soiled minds of soiled men until it erupts periodically with life-threatening ferocity. Why would a man – a married man with a daughter of his own – want to do such a thing to an innocent child? And how would he ever be caught?
Mason thought it was a clean crime. He was always careful – never left clues. After all, he’d got away with it the last time in Manchester. But paedophilia is never clean… never safe.
Now it’s Jack Hunter’s case – Detective Inspector Jack Hunter of the Paedophile Unit, Scotland Yard – and this one is close to home. When Hunter discovers that the child is the daughter of a dead PC – a police hero – the case takes on a new edge. Justice must prevail, but first Jack must find him.
In this gripping novel, Peter Kinsley draws on his experience as a Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter in Fleet Street to form a minute-by-minute composite picture – an insight into the thoughts and daily life of the four main characters and their families – of the victim, the paedophile, the Detective Inspector, and the newspaper reporter.
A gritty story that shows the love/hate relationship of police and press, and the grinding pursuit of clues by the detective and the journalist, culminating in a stunning courtroom finale in the grand tradition of English court drama.
The author uses his own background as an investigative Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter in Fleet Street to build a composite of paedophile crime that he has covered.
He wrote the first book about the Yorkshire Ripper – entitled I’m Jack, The Police Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper with a colleague, Frank Smyth – which was published by Pan Books before Sutcliffe was caught.
Although To Catch A Paedophile has been written as a fictional story, all the facts – amazingly – contained therein are from actual criminal cases.
Another superbly crafted novel from Peter Kinsley.

Price: £16.99

Reviews

"Peter Kinsley's latest novel, To Catch a Paedophile, is his best yet. Solidly founded on the reality of his own experience as a crime reporter on the national press in Fleet Street's heyday, this story of police and newspapermen hunting a pathological lover of young girls is as shockingly topical as today's newspaper and television bulletins.
Paedophilia is not a new phenomenon, of course, but it is now more unflinchingly revealed and understood than ever before. Kinsley penetrates into the murky psychological depths of the perversion and follows the progress of a grimly believable contemporary case and months of forensic detective work and journalistic guile.
Kinsley's vivid, street-wise writing reveals the anguish of the mother of a paedophile's victim and the symbiotic relationship of detectives who try to keep their investigations secret and reporters who do everything they can to achieve full disclosure. Furthermore, surprisingly, the novel is rich in low-life London humour."
Patrick Skene Catling

"Provides an insight into the minds of all the characters involved – the victim, the attacker, the police inspector, and the crime reporter – and a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the whole detection process that could only have been written by someone who has been there and done it. Peter Kinsley and I were Fleet Street reporters together before I became a film critic and he went on to write books."
Barry Norman
 
"To Catch A Paedophile is an in-depth look at what happens behind the newspaper headlines of a major crime investigation. Peter Kinsley has written a wonderful, thought-provoking book that is rich in detail, and in the best tradition of detective novels."
Alan Sillitoe

THE GOLD BIDET

The Story:   An American professor, writing about Vichy France, innocently and naively opens the closet of a sleepy French village, and the skeletons of greed, corruption, collaboration with the enemy, the dreaded Milice, the Gestapo informers, life under the Swastika, and, after the pillaging of his house, the death of a resistance hero in Buchenwald concentration camp.
But a consignment of gold belonging to Hermann Goering is missing:  there follows a breakneck scramble to find it, involving the French police and secret service, a kidnapping, an assassination, gangsters from the Union Corse, a micro-light, a sexy French policewoman and action aboard a drugs-running motor yacht. History comes alive when the author tears apart the past and reveals who was behind the murder of 4,051 Jewish children arrested by the French police and sent by train from occupied Paris to Auschwitz.

Price: £16.99

Reviews

"A great read!  It reveals France's darkest wartime secrets"
Neal Ascherson
 
"Here is Mediterranean sex, assassination, and a fight for gold bullion in the James Bond tradition, and something more important than Ian Fleming ever attempted:  in the course of his fast-moving thriller Peter Kinsley has exposed political scandal that French wartime collaborators, and their descendants, have long tried to keep secret."
Patrick Skene Catling (The Spectator)
   
"Liberte was taken by the Germans, Egalite depended on favour and corruption, Fraternite was lost as neighbour spied on neighbour. Its revelations drag you into the murky past.  An intriguing, contemporary thriller, a clever mixture of fact and fiction, it is a breakneck ride through France's seamier history and shameful past.  Based on a true mystery, the gold bidet is the price of corruption."  
Ed Egan, Director, La Garenne, France

THE SHY PORNOGRAPHER

The Story:   An American author is broke in Paris, so he turns his much acclaimed "Down Mexico Way" into a "dirty book", named "The Victim" and regrets his temporary materialism until Hollywood decides to offer him a film deal.  Baxter Burns' antics make Gully Jimpson in "The Horse's Mouth" and "The Ginger Man" of J.P. Donleavy look like choir boys!   From his Bohemian haven in Ibiza, to New York, Minneapolis, Hollywood and Las Vegas, on a hard-drinking spree, and finally in an armoured car, wearing a crash helmet and an asbestos suit to feel safe in what has become a dangerous country -- America  -- he uses all his guile to usurp the plans of his crooked French publisher and the avaricious film producer and the gangsters he employs to steal what has now become "The Passionate Victim".
Hiding out with his sister, a teacher in Minneapolis, Baxter makes a soul-stirring speech to the University students on behalf of artists everywhere, but the Hollywood producer is not finished with him yet... A severely shocked Baxter finds himself starring in a sex romp with a beautiful Hollywood star, who, to the delight of the students, has secretly filmed him, starkers, striking poses and quoting his favourite author -- Shakespeare.

Price: £16.99

Reviews

"Peter Kinsley writes with wit, humour, and sharp insight.  The Shy Pornographer would make a very good film, for the grown-up, more discerning film fan."
Barry Norman
 
"Pure comedy.  But when I read the main character's speech to Minneapolis University students I shed a tear for artists everywhere."
Max Crawford (Author of Lords of the Plain)
 
"I enjoyed it hugely.  There are some great characters, marvellous elements of farce, and a rollicking pace to it all."
Magnus Linklater  (Columnist, The Times)
       
"The Shy Pornographer is a wonderful read: readable and rich in the best of the good old English literary tradition."
Alan Sillitoe
 
"Here is a comic novel that is really funny, with funny jokes about a funny hero.  The Shy Pornographer is also a colourful travelogue from Ibiza to New York, Las Vegas and Hollywood and back again, and ends with an eloquent, serious message on behalf of exploited writers in general."
Patrick Skene Catling  (The Spectator)

THE VALLEY OF THE BUTTERFLIES 

The Story: is set in South West France where the author has built a house for his partner Carolyn and her son, Rupert, aged 9).  As a family they take part in the grape harvests and witness the last great days of the armies of grape pickers from Spain, the music and guitars, before the machines rolled in. There are vivid descriptions of the village fetes, the Mardi Gras carnivals, and the mushrooming, hunting for wild boar, fishing for trout in the rivers and lakes, and wonderful picnics in the country of wine and food. He introduces a crowd of unforgettable characters both French and British in the land of troubadors and poetry, music and song...

Price: £7.99

Reviews

"I enjoyed these memoirs immensely (Vols. One to Four)....especially the French period, for I know something about the Herault, having lived some years in Languedoc."
Squadron Leader Tony Iveson, DFC (who led the raid of 617 Squadron which sank the Tirpitz in 1944)

"A delightful book.  It has the absolute taste of the French experience.  It is as rural as truffle sniffing and the eleven o'clocl pastis (morning, that is!).  It is as far removed from other books about the South of France as Paris is from Provence, as the author of this book lived in France for 23 years, and in  the South of France for 18 years, not one year."
Ed Egan (Director, La Garenne, France)

"I enjoyed The Valley of the Butterflies" -
Alastair Campell

"It's brilliant, so wonderfully laconic and so funny. I laughed so much I had to stifle it."
Lynne Reid Banks

BOGGED DOWN IN COUNTY LYRIC 

The Story: The cover shows Peter "McGinn" Kinsley under sail with the great writer of sea stories, Tristan Jones, who taught Kinsley how to sail off Ibiza, which was then an undiscovered island. Jones, whose real name was Arthur covered his past as the illegitimate son of a Lancashire mill-girl, and meeting Kinsley decided him to write his way to fame (or infamy). Years later, sailing over "Papillon's" escape route from Devil's Island, he realised it was faked, and foolishly decided to fake "Ice" about an attempt to circumnavigate Iceland.  Kinsley knew from Jones that he had been stuck in Finland! But who would know? The true Sagittarian Kinsley had itchy feet, and the story flits from London, where he drank with Marty Feldman, John Hurt, David Warner and Tony Booth, and  from Ibiza to Soho, Hampstead,  New York, Acapulco,Corfu, Istanbul, Israel, France and Germany. The Storyteller recounts drinking with Robert Mitchum in "21", living in the Chelsea Hotel, and meeting John Berrryman in Mixter's bar, Minneapolis just before the poet committed suicide. And he reveals how Clifford Irving faked the Howard Hughes memoirs while he and Kinsley rubbed shoulders in Ibiza with Terry-Thomas, Denhom Elliot, Elmyr de Hory, Ursula Andress and Sarah Churchill.

Price: £9.99

Reviews

"The narrative is taken up where the author left off in Volume Two, and it is quite a line-up:  Steve Primero, the archetypal alcoholic writer, penniless, perpetually plastered, quick to take offence and unrelentingly rude;  Tristan Jones, an old salt with a wicked sense of humour; George and Wauna with their rapier-like repartee; Doreen on her perch in the corner ('I'm half Irish and half pissed and I came to Spain to get away from twats like you.')  when told to "watch your language".   The reviewer is spoilt by the number of anecdotes in this marvellous book..." 
Martin Davies

"Peter Kinsley covers the period that he spent on Ibiza just before the arrival of mass tourism and the commercialisation that subsequently made Ibiza globally famous.  Bogged Down in County Lyric gives a fascinating insight into the way of life  and the primitive lifestyle and landscape that originally attracted so many artists, writers and other escapists to this tiny rock in the middle of the Mediterranean.  Many amongst us who have followed in their foosteps will find it easy to relate to this description of what was then a secret paradise."
Ibiza Now magazine (Culture)

GUNNER STRIKES BACK 

The Story:   is about the British army in France (1953-55) told through the eyes of a Wonder Dog -- little Gunner, a mongrel picked up in the back streets of Fontainebleau near Napoleon's palace, where the young Nationial Serviceman Kinsley had an office  working with N.A.T.O.
An hilarious account of a crowd of reluctant conscripts counting the days to "demob" and a return to "civvy street" but managing to have a great time in Paris (and Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Holland and Germany) while counting! Gunner hates the Corporal Major and the Corporal Major (The Horse Guards) hates dogs, and so the Guards drill instructor who had drilled the men for the Berlin Victory Parade in 1945 ("Those hairy-arsed Rooshans ruined my parade. They all had flat caps, were six foot tall, and looked like a field of bleedin' corn!") orders the drivers to drop Gunner in Paris.
The Wonder Dog has other ideas, however, and twice walks back, 60 kilometres, and the third time walks half way to Melun then hitches a lift with the drivers returning from "Les Halles" market.  Gunner fights back when Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, takes a magnificent salute from the Corporal Major ...and the men of the army and the navy and the R.A.F.  who still remember Gunner will place a plaque on his grave in Camp Guynemer, in September 2006 on behalf of the Fontainebleau Veterans Association (www.fontainebleauveteransassociation.co.uk).   Gunner R.I.P.

Price: £7.99

Reviews

"Gunner is my mutt!" 
Michael Koepf, (author of The Fisherman's Son, former Green Beret, Vietnam)

"Gunner was much loved by the R.A.F men on Camp Guynemer, who adopted him after he was found, badly beaten, and taken to a vet. who pulled him round.  He attended all our rugby matches, went on training runs, came on parade, and travelled with the lads by motor bike, bicycle or car around Fontainebleau.  He was buried with full military honours in a grave in the air force camp, and we still remember him..."
Ted Caton (Author of An Erk's Eye View, the experiences of an R.A.F. National Serviceman) www.fontainebleauveteransassociation.co.uk

ALL THE FIELDS ARE COVERED WITH SNOW 

The Story: This is the story of Peter, a boy evacuated in wartime Britain to the depressed coal mining village of No Place in County Durham, England. Here, he experiences  the hardship of a poverty compounded by the deprivations of war. But with his brother Jonty and friends, Peter escapes from the grind of rationing through mischief and adventure. Written partly in a stream of consciusness style this memoir of wartime as experienced by a child is brimming with vivid descriptions and succeeds in bring both realistic and poetic. As the boy who is in love with words begins to reach manhood, the words and the rhythms they make help him to test and then exceed the boundaries of church and family.

Reviews

"I loved the book -- it made me laugh and cry."
Neal Ascherson

"A lovingly detailed record of a World War II  childhood and a threadbare, innocent world that is now as lost as Ur of the Chaldees"
Al Alvarez (poetry editor of The Observer)

"A fascinating record of young lives in the Second World War"
Penny Ritchie Calder, Curator, The Imperial War Museum, London.

"A wartime story that took forty years to tell ... now to be used in a major exhibition of Children at War at The Imperial War Museum, London"
Matthew McKenzie, The Sunday Sun, Newcastle upon Tyne.

"I relished the very full and detailed recollections of the main character -- it was dense and so memorable.  I can't think it's been done so thoroughly before.  There's not a note wrong, and the continuallyu acute observations are a feast.  The people in it live deeply and ideosyncratically enough to be remembered, and that's something/  It was perhaps more interesting to me because I come from below the religion line -- nothing to give the hard times any sense, though I don't regret it because it meant plenty of necessary and desirable freedom.  As for the teachers at Peter's school, I recall an aunt of mine, a blacksmith's daughter, who marched into school and knocked a teacher down who had been tormenting her son!
This book is quite an achievement.  The description of the winter of 40/41 took me back!"
Alan Sillitoe

"Enchanting ... it evoked many memories of my own, some sad and some funny."
Sandy Fawkes (Author of Killing Time)

"A lyrical and deeply moving account of his wartime evacuation to a depressed coalmining village incongrously named No Place."
Alfred Draper (Author of The Amritsar Massacre: Twilight of the Raj)

DON'T TELL MY MOTHER I'M A NEWSPAPERMAN 

The Story: After grammar school and a college to learn shorthand, Peter McGinn as the author now styles himself, is flung headfirst into a newspaper office staffed by incredible characters who have come through the war and do not give a damn!  The Sports writer, Harry Cork, was shot down in a bomber; the photographer and both reporters  were ex R.A.F. and on small invalidity pensions.  Chorus girls from "Gay's The Word" dance naked on the office desks as the beer and wine flow and the devil-may-care reporters are off on a spree...and Pete is 17 year of age. After two years in the British army, conscripted for "National Service", Pete McGinn is flung further afield, into the mad world of journalism and drinking in Manchester and then in Fleet Street where he becomes a sub-editor on the 4,500,000 copies a day (the highest daily sale in the world) Daily Mirror, at £24 a week.  Now it is girls, champagne and the night-clubs of 50's London.  Peter is 21.  The war is over!  It is time to live! A Scotland Yard accredited crime reporter on the Daily Express, he meets murderer Donald Hume who gives him his cellmate Dr. Klaus Fuchs' new design for an atom bomb!

Shirley Bassey is shot up and invites McGinn into her bed to keep warm while he does the interview and she signs his shorthand notes. The French Riviera next, where he freelances for 14 papers and the BBC with his old colleague from Newcastle, Lucas Lime, and meets all the stars and celebrities of Monte Carlo (where Peter swims in the pool with Princess Grace) and the Cannes film festival where he gets drunk with Richard Harris and interviews Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale and the great Harold Lloyd who performed his own stunts in silent movies. The Index to Volume II is a Who's Who of the 60's:  Lord Snowdon, Lady Astor, Francis Bacon, Brigitte Bardot, Warren Beatty, Lord Montagu, the Duke of Bedford, Brendan Behan, Aneurin Bevan, Lord Beveridge, Richard Burton, Winston Churchill, Jean Cocteau Noel Coward, Diana Dors, King Farouk, Peter Finch, Ian Fleming, George Formby, Lucien Freud, Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, Paul Getty, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Jack Hawkins, William Randolph Hearst (son of "Citizen Kane"), Vyvyan Holland (son of Oscar Wilde), Trevor Howard, Augustus John, Christine Keeler, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Jimmy Lewthwaite (the reporter who invented the Loch Ness monster), 'Lucky' Luciano, Princess Margaret, Somerset Maugham, Robert Mitchum, Lord Montgomery, Stirling Moss, David Niven, Peter O'Toole, Aristotle Onassis, John Osborne, Gregpry Peck, Edith Piaf, Oliver Reed, Mandy Rice Davis, Hannen Swaffer, Elizabeth Taylor, Stephen Ward, and a few more... The next stop is Rome and "The Vatican Beat" and "The Tit Beat" as the American Daily News reporter Reynolds Packard (He had a bullet hole through his trilby hat, a souvenir of the Spanish civil war) always called it.  And more girls and more champagne, but it is time to leave journalism and start writing novels.   Andrew Loog Oldham had given him the title of his first novel "Three Cheers for Nothing" and London beckoned for "McGinn" and Oldham (who became manager of The Rolling Stones).  Oldham fell in love with a Rolls Royce, and McGinn with the girl who sat next to Julie Christie in Drama School in Swiss Cottage... and that's another story from The Storyteller.

Reviews

"This is the most vivid and entertaining account written of the "Last Age" of Fleet Street -- the era when the basic irreverence and humanity of journalists finally broke through into the pages of their own newspapers.  Peter Kinsley, who worked on papers in northern England and as a self employed British correspondent on the French Riviera, belonged to the great period of the tabloid and popular "diaries":  the gossip columns which ostensibly chronicled the high life of the Establishment, but which did so with an increasingly radical ferocity that discredited and punctured the high-and-mighty.  Nobody reading Kinsley will go on believing that the 1950s were a dull decade.  The procession of laughing, outrageous reprobates in his pages (some journalists, some their victrims) shows very clearly how the way was being opened for the "Satire Boom" of London in the 60's.  These two books of memoir (Vols I & II) are a wonderfully comic read but they are also infallible source material for anyone studying the "end of deference" in Britain and the prelude to the head-on political and social challenges in the next period."
Neal Ascherson

"A nostalgic walk down memory lane for those who recall the halcyon days of Fleet Street.  Peter recounts with humour the many stories concerning himself and the Greats who bestrode The Street in those times.  He also reminds us of what great fun it could be, an element that seems sadly missing in today's newspaper world."
Alfred Draper

THE EARLY NOVELS  by PETER KINSLEY   (obtainable from book dealers)

THREE CHEERS FOR NOTHING

A young con-man lives inside the model whale in the Kensington Natural History museum to save paying rent and comes out to steal the Crown Jewels!

Reviews

"This picaroon is a funny one"
The New York Times

"It could be sub-titled The Villain's Guide"
The Glasow Evening Times

"The chronicle is full of tips and tales which nearly make one split one's sides"
The Times Literary Supplement

"Mr. Jonathan Cheers is a happy comic creation. He lives by his wits and is very witty, as is his creator Peter Kinsley"
The  Buffalo News

"Uninhibited, screwball comedy... a wild novel... very funny...this minor bit of happiness"
The Chicago American

"A swiftly-paced spoof of the competitive and amoral world of today.  Kinsley can chalk up a huge success with this blithe, cleverly contrived piece of writing.  It follows the trend of light-hearted, nothing sacred English comic fictgion"
The Sacfremento Bee

"Thoroughly Runyonesque in its characters"
Charlotte Observer

"A merry tale of an engaging London confidence man"
The Washington Star

"This novel is the wittiest, spoofiest, uninhibited bit of English comic fiction that has hit our shores this year"
Dallas Times-Herald

"Exceedingly well written, highly humourous. To old P.G. Wodehouse fans there will be a throwback to Bertie Wooster in Jonathan Cheers"
Fort Wayne News Sentinel

"A very funny book"
Peter Sellers

"I hope it is a success"
Evelyn Waugh (postcard to the author)

"I want to play The Countess"
Bette Davis

"I want to play Jonathan Cheers"
Cary Grant

"I'd like to film it and put the Beatles in it!"
John Schlesinger

"I'd like to script it, produce it, direct it and star in it"
Peter Cook

PIMPERNEL 60

Reviews

"Tough, intelligent, properly cynical"
The London Evening Standard

"The action is fast and unpredictable"
The Spectator

"Highly individual, this, and harshly exciting."
The Sunday Times

"Mr. Kinsley has woven a gripping, and frequently exciting narrative"
The Month (the Jesuit magazine)

"A disquieting thriller, convincingly written"
The Sunday Telegraph

"Stupendous scenery ... physical suspense ... at once serious and with a fresh attack"
The San Francisco Chronicle

"An absorbing, provocative novel"
The New York Times

"Chesterton's shade nods approval at an unusual thriller"
The Northern Echo

THE VATCHMAN SWITCH

Reviews

"A tale of complicated interaction of several intelligence services, told with skilful use of background and colour"
South Wales Argus

"People who write good thrillers often have to do a lot of homework.  As The Vatchmnan Switch shows, Peter Kinsley knows Turkey and, especially, Istanbul, and the flavour of corruption, and the horrors of Syria and the Lebanon as well .   He knows about terrorists, German and Irish, and about the officials who don't kill.  Then he knows about weapons, mostly illicit ones, and all this knowing melds into a fine thriller"
Marghanita Laski, The Listener

THE PISTOLERO

The Spanish civil war, partially set in Ibiza.

Reviews

"The final twists and turns are ingenius to say the least"
Martin Davies, live ibiza bibliomaniacs corner

I'M JACK -  THE POLICE HUNT FOR THE YORKSHIRE RIPPER

Reviews

"Mr. Kinsley and Mr. Smyth are storytellers.."
The Sunday Telegraph

"Brilliant ...with broad-minded humanity .. and so kind to the whores..."
Sandy Fawkes

"Absolutely accurate in every detail of a coroner's function"
Mr. Roderick Davies
(the Manchester coroner  who, much to police displeasure, gave details of the examination by Home Office pathologist Mr. Reuben Woodcock of "Scotch" Jean Royle's body at the inquest in May, 1978)