"This is not what one could call in any shape or form a pretty story. It is the plain unvarnished tale of a man who has been a notorious criminal from his boyhood days, and it is printed only because it will prove, in a way that all the prison statistics in the world cannot prove, that you can't win at the crooked game...."
So begins the introduction to the original 1929 edition of
I Was a Bandit
by Eddie Guerin, a notorious thief who kept newspaper readers entertained on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1800's. After a lifetime of crime, he was eventually given a life sentence on Devil's Island-from which he escaped-and sold his life story to a publisher. This reprint from Staccato Crime is the first new edition of that book in over 90 years.