[King of the Gypsies, a] violent and shocking book about the sixty-odd American gypsy clans could do much to rehabilitate our native ones by throwing up comforting comparisons. The murderous and tyrannical "King" Tene Bimbo, whose obese and squalid figure overshadows the whole scene, is about the most odious character any writer could choose for a subject. And yet it can be said that such gypsies, any gypsies, are largely what Western society has made them. Through the ages the persecutions and killings have been appalling, not even stopping with the murder of half a million gypsies tricked into Hitler's gas chambers by the promise of relief….

King of the Gypsies comes across as the story of a cruel, hated, and seemingly hateful American minority; though I am not entirely sure that this is what the author intended, and some personal knowledge of gypsies in this country inclines me to the belief that there must be hardworking and kindly ones in America too. In America, it seems, they escape the "computerized surveillance" of a credit card economy by having no fixed address, being unable to read or write, accordingly filling in no forms, and stealing what they need….

Despite all that modern detection and police methods can do, an American gypsy who doesn't want to be traced will not be traced—except by an American gypsy; and when that happens the motive, apparently, is murder, torture, arson, robbery, or the kidnapping of a young girl for compulsory marriage. Gypsies, says Mr Maas, and he really ought to know after all his work on American police methods, "do not exist in the US outside the police files"; and no one in the official world knows where they are for two days together. Yet the Bimbo tribe gets most of its income from "settling out of court" for fraudulent claims and accusations brought against carefully selected victims in respectable society. It all seems more than a century and 3,000 miles from George Borrow's sentimental "Life is very sweet, brother" and the everlasting wind on the heath.

But the tale is well told, hard, crisp reading, sharp as a dagger, and lacking only two features: an index (which I should have thought simply essential), and any attempt to offer a solution to one of America's cruellest social dilemmas. On the last page Steve's old Romany aunt sits with her eyes "focussed somewhere in the occult distance, as if brooding over the inevitability of it all". Mr Maas asks her what is going to happen to the gypsies. "The gypsies?" she says abstractedly. "Oh well, we'll just go on, you know, like always."