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This is the story of Ray ‘The Cat’ Jones who wanted to become middleweight boxing champion of the world but eventually made his mark as the greatest cat burglar of all time. He is a legend thanks to his headline grabbing escape from London’s Pentonville Prison in 1958, as well as endless audacious thefts.
Ray is a teetotal, fitness obsessed, working-class Welshman whose boxing ambitions are thwarted after corrupt cops fit him up for a crime he didn’t commit. When Ray gets out of jail he embarks on a criminal crusade against the inequities of British society. He is a modern-day Robin Hood waging an ideological class war against the rich. From the jewels of movie stars Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren, to the private papers of the Duke of Windsor, paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt, and the furs of the London aristocracy, Ray’s carefully targeted burglaries are perfectly planned and thrillingly executed.
A great London novel and a vision of the city’s underworld from wartime to near present. The narrative weaves between the clubs of Soho, populated by gangsters and gamblers, to the mansions of Kensington and Hampstead, inhabited by corrupt politicians and millionaires, and on into the dingy cells of the city’s prisons.
The narrative is based on the real-life escapades of Raymond Jones, who as a young man left the Welsh village of Nantyglo for adventures in London. He died from pancreatic cancer in 2001 at the age of 84.
