East End wideboy capers

Jake Arnott's third book (after the hugely successful The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers) revisits the now familiar territory of shady deals, East End wideboys and contract killings. In short, the whole cheeky-Cockneys-with-guns caper that's proved so lucrative for novelists such as Arnott and film directors such as Guy 'Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels' Ritchie.

To be fair to Arnott, his take on the London underworld is somewhat less cartoonish than Ritchie's, and his central character - Tony Meehan, a ghostwriter for mobsters-turned-memoirists - has a keen sense of the dishonesties of his trade.

Make it sound authentic, his publisher urges him. 'That is to say,' thinks Tony, 'make this intelligent, emotionally complex, deviously manipulative professional villain sound like an engaging thug, a curious monster.' But for all Meehan's/Arnott's aspirations towards philosophical depth (epigraphs come courtesy of Orwell, Brecht and Huxley), Truecrime never quite convinced me that it was much more than gangster porn - to coin another neologism - for the titillation of public schoolboys. If that's your thing, though, no one does it better than Arnott.