Top-Drawer Villain

A couple of summers ago I received an email from a lady inviting me to write her husband’s life story. He was, she told me, ‘a successful business man as well as a gangster, greatly respected among criminals.’   

I’d already written a fair amount of true-crime but I thought I’d put crime behind me. In fact, after publishing my e-book, ‘A Virgin in the Philippines,’ I thought I’d finished writing for good because I was already well into my eighties and enough is enough. I’d written more than twenty books, fact and fiction; I’d been traditionally published and self-published; I’d won a number of writing awards such as the South East Arts Prose Prize and the National Association of Writers Groups award for ‘best novel.’ Time to put my feet up.

But this proposal was so tempting. My true-crime writing had always been at one or more removes from criminals in the flesh. This would be so different. I thought for at least three minutes about whether I should accept the proposal. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

I asked the lady to send me some details of her husband’s career and back came several newspaper cuttings and dog-eared documents compiled by family members. It wasn’t an absolutely clear tale nor was it complete. But the contents were absorbing. Eddie Blundell was a genuine hard man. He’d been in Borstal and prisons; in his youth he’d been involved in stealing and ‘slaughtering’ (concealing) heavy-goods lorries. He’d been shot by rivals in Ilford High Road and at a pop-concert attended by 100,000 people he and his ‘crew’ had mauled the rampaging Hells Angels who were taking over the festival and interfering with his fleet of ice-cream vans.

On leaving Borstal Eddie had decided to concentrate on making what he called ‘real money’. In his very early twenties he bought an ice-cream van and went on to build a hugely successful business, Piccadilly Whip. It made him a millionaire.

For thirty years from the 60s, his success was won and maintained with muscle. There were the Turks and the Italian ice-cream men as well as Eddie, all of them vying for the choice sites in London – The Tower, Hyde Park, Madame Tussauds, Speakers Corner, Park Lane. They fought with fists, with bottles, iron bars or whatever was at hand. Fortunately for Eddie there were always enough corrupt senior policemen to ease his way.

Then came the fall: the sudden lack of police support; a trial; a four-year sentence; investigations by the Inland Revenue. On release he was no longer a very wealthy man.

So this was the material I had to work on, which I had to research. And I loved it.

The fact that Eddie lived in Essex and I in Sussex didn’t prove to be a problem. He would speak onto disk and his wife Amanda would then type up his words and email them to me.

That system worked very well. My central task was to rearrange the often muddled account into a coherent and exciting story. Meeting Eddie and Amanda twice for lengthy sessions resolved some of the inconsistencies and filled in the gaps.

There were two major problems. How could I write an account which contained many incidents that horrified me (such as a man being ‘glassed’ in a pub by one of Eddie’s followers)?  And I’d have to ferret out certain matters that Eddie was clearly reluctant to disclose. I decided to act as a ghost-writer, like a Defence Counsel, avoiding those matters that might embarrass my client. The story would be written from Eddie’s point of view. His name and not mine would appear on the book cover.

The second difficulty was Eddie’s frequent use of strong language. Would this deter readers?  I asked advice from other writers and most important I asked Eddie’s advice.

‘Yeah,’ he told me, ‘that’s how I talk. It’s me, my language.’

So ahead I went, always aiming to shape the information and capture Eddie’s voice register and never shirking his florid vocabulary.

After eighteen months and the exchange of biblical quantities of material, ‘Top-Drawer Villain’ was published. It’s the story of a man of whom I ought to disapprove. After all, my transgressions amount to no more than five speeding offences. But I’d say that now we are friends. I like the man. Odd.

I’ve often wondered what Eddie has got out of having his book published. He has never tried to justify his career in crime. He’s not craving fame. Maybe it’s just his way of analysing his life as he’s lived it.

And what have I got out of it? What every writer hopes for – satisfaction for having good material out of which to fashion a decent book which has won great reviews and has been featured on BBC Radio Two’s Steve Wright Show. It’s been great.

‘Top-Drawer Villain’ by Eddie Blundell was published in November 2013 by Pomegranate Press. It is available from Amazon.co.uk as both a paperback (£7.99) and an ebook (£5.99). Paperback versions are also available as from either ebay.uk or Pomegranate Press  [email protected]).

Johnnie Johnson

Details of Johnnie Johnson’s writing career are on his website: www.johnniejohnson.co.uk