The Great Train Robbery co-ordinated the actions of 15 highly idiosyncratic thugs. It was supported by scores, if not hundreds, of underworld 'supply troops'…. Therefore, one way of looking at this 1963 'crime of the century' is as an expression of London working-class culture….

This is one of the fascinating sidelights of Read's account [The Train Robbers], which he collected from the eager testimonies of the robbers who are out of prison…. Alas, like so much else of possible interest, it remains a sidelight to the main but conventional drama, a brisk re-run (yet again) of How It Was Done.

I don't know how much of the narrative to believe…. [According to the robbers interviewed, the train robbery] was financed by £80,000 from the Nazi adventurer, Otto Skorzeny…. One reason why [The Train Robbers] is more mystifying than necessary is that Read, at first taken in by the Skorzeny lie; presents it to us in the body of his story as factually true, and only in the last chapter exposes it as a collective fantasy dreamed up to make the whole proposition more commercially appealing. In other words, Read gives the facts as he was told them. He has made little apparent effort to do an independent investigation other than to nail the Skorzeny fable.

I was both mildly absorbed and disappointed by this account of how 15 squabbling, violent men robbed the Glasgow-to-London overnight mail of two-and-a-half million pounds. Chiefly what emerges is the general amateurishness of the thieves….

The trouble is that Read, though an accomplished novelist, almost completely fails to characterise any of the robbers…. I had to keep turning back to the photographs rather than the text to follow who was whom. It is as if only the journalistic half of the writer's mind was at work.

However, he does retell the story of the robbery with brisk competence….

One's attitude to this book may depend on one's personal experience…. I have never been badly robbed. But once, in hospital, I watched a bank guard, a rather nice old man, slowly die of head injuries caused by a coshing. It makes a difference.