Walsall Borough Police - A Theatre of Crime: Horace Stone (1902-1968)

As the author leads you into the unbelievable antics of an infamous career criminal of the early 1900’s, the book outlines local social history of Walsall at the time and the hardships of life in an era of poverty. The character Horace Stone, after tragically starting out on the wrong foot from a very early age, continued on the path of crime as just a seemingly normal way of his everyday life and ‘Theatre of Crime’ very aptly describes the bizarre capers he afforded the Police Force and members of the Courtrooms during his many crimes and trials. A real life factual book that is well written and researched, the book also contains interesting pictures throughout, keeping alive the memory of real people, police officers and places of the time and as the final pages approached I could not put this book down. I was compelled to learn the fate, of this maybe insane, but larger than life criminal charmer who gave Walsall Borough Police the run around for so many years. I highly recommend it!

An amazing story and living in part of this era can identify the people and the time, it is well written and sign of the time. It is something you pick up and can't put down, without telling anything he was a amazing man and if it hadn't been true it would have been unbelievable. Paul has written it well and must have spent a lot of time and effort into writing it.