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You ain't got nothing on me

The sixth season of The Sopranos started with a montage of what the characters are currently doing after the long break, set to "Seven Souls" of William Burroughs read over a synthesizer track. (Crap, do I feel so old and ignorant of having to put it that way, since I don't know what that particular type of machine beat is called.)

I had read "Wild Boys" and "Naked Lunch" a long time ago and remember these books being very confusing. Last year when I picked up "Junky" at the library, I naturally expected it to be a similar cut and paste stream of drugged stream of consciousness. To my surprise, this book was almost the exact opposite of his more famous books: a straightforward and easy-to-read, an almost documentary look at how the drug users of 1950's live, think and operate. When I read this book, it was amusing to imagine the characters looking and sounding like characters in the movies of that era. At the end of the book there was an appendix of proper lingo, so you could study it and then sound like a real hepcat.

I was reminded of this book when I read "Crime as Work" by Peter Letkemann, published in 1973. This book provides a sociological view to how various types of career criminals operate, based on prison interviews of a number of them. The book first describes the prison culture of career criminals and the way that the typical career criminal's career progresses from juvenile delinquency to more professional attitude. Ending up in jail occasionally is just a part of the job description, and you just have to do your own time, forget the outside world and not cry on anybody else's shoulder. The book then goes on to provide detailed instructions on how to properly open a safe with explosives, how to rob a bank and do crowd control and escape, and how to properly "case" a joint. Perhaps someone could propose a "for Dummies" book about this general theme, since few things are as sexy as criminals.

Read today, the book is practically quaint, since the rounders and pete-men depicted in it come up looking somewhat like The Beagle Boys. I tried to imagine them as characters of the Dirty Harry movies, but to no avail. Many things have changed since then, so most of the advice of this book must be outdated. For example, I wonder if there are any professional safecrackers any more, and I kind of doubt that robbers these days feel a sense of pride for their invisible and neglegted skill to not use a gun, that is, being able to control the robbery so that it doesn't escalate to actual shooting. Prisons have probably also changed quite a lot since those days, for various reasons that we could conjecture about, so that they are no longer places where the crusty old veterans teach their skills to admiring young amateurs who want to become professionals themselves. For more information about this particular topic, Edward Bunker's books provide a treasure trove of material.

One immense cultural difference that I myself noticed immediately when I first visited Canada was that libraries and bookstores have large "true crime" sections, since the whole genre is virtually nonexistent in Finland. Criminals are significantly less jolly in the book "Natural Born Celebrities", which examines the public fascination of serial killers starting from Jack The Ripper and H. H. Holmes to modern-era Ted Bundy and Hannibal Lecter. It then goes into detail about such popular shows as The X-Files and Millennium. One quite interesting chapter of the book examines the interplay of normalcy and monstrosity in how serial killers are seen in public, and how either one can be emphasized depending on the particular case.

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