A Day in the Life of a Crime Reporter

The notion of “a day in the life of …” brings to mind John Lennon's haunting song from Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which starts with the words “I read the news today, oh boy …” And, fifty-odd years after first hearing those words on some dreamy, summer afternoon, every day in my life starts with me reading the news today, and often muttering “oh, boy,” as I go through it.

As is the case with most old journalists, an addiction to news remains strong. If I am in London I go round the corner to my local newsagent and buy the Guardian, still the best and most honest newspaper in the country. And like most old newspaper journalists I find it sad that so few people buy a newspaper now because they assume that news is something that should be provided for free. When I first started working for the Guardian in the 1980s my father, whose daily paper was The Scotsman, said that he would have changed to the Guardian but it didn't have Scottish obituaries. Now I have reached an age where the obituary pages are essential reading. However, my heart does sink when I read a newspaper report, or hear a news broadcast of the death of someone well-known which is full of “RIP” quotes from tweets. How can some poor soul rest in peace when hearse-chasers they hardly knew are knocking out look-at-me tweets about their death?

My days recently have been spent reading the proofs for an updated version of a book I wrote twenty-five years ago called The Underworld. What struck me as I went through it was how many “mad” people were in it. “Mad” Frankie Fraser, of course, features often but there was also “Mad” Teddy Smith, and Frank “the Mad Axeman” Mitchell whom the Krays helped to escape from Dartmoor in the 1960s before having him killed when he became a nuisance. Crime must be the one profession in which being regarded as “mad” is a positive; although I recall that, as I took my leave of Ron Kray on a visit to Broadmoor, his parting words were “don't print I'm mad!”

Part of the updati