Pearson - 2013;1995;

Discoverbooks by John Pearson published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JohnPearson

Arena
Biggles
Bloody Royal
Crusader in Pink
Edward the Rake
Facades
Painfully Rich
The Bellamy Saga
The Kindness of Dr. Avincenna
The Life of Ian Fleming
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill
The Profession of Violence
The Ultimate Family

John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at Kings College School and later at Cambridge, where he read history.

In the early years of his career, Pearson worked on various newspapers including The Economist, The Times, and The Sunday Times on which he was an assistant to Ian Fleming. He went on to write the first biography of Ian Fleming in 1966. He would also become the third official James Bond author of the adult Bond series with his first-person biography of the fictional agent, James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007. During the span of his career, he has written multiple novels and many more works of non-fiction.

Pearson now divides his time between London and West Sussex.

In 1929 a doctor called Lange from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich created a stir among psychologists and criminologists by reviving the unfashionable theory of biological inheritance as a factor in the making of a criminal.

For several years Lange had been studying the character and history of criminal twins. He had started from the point established by Sir Francis Galton in England in the 1870s that there are two sorts of twins and that the differences between them are fundamental. The commonest twins are what are known as binovular or double-egg twins, formed when two female eggs are fertilized by separate male germ cells. The result is two babies who, although twins, have no greater chance of inherited similarities than ordinary brothers and sisters of the same parents. In rarer cases, something like three to four per thousand live births, a single fertilized egg splits within the womb to produce twins that are biological carbon-copies of each other. They have a uniform heredity and sex, look alike and are known as identical or uni-ovular twins.

By studying the records of the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, Lange discovered thirty convicted criminals with twin brothers or sisters: of these pairs thirteen were identical twins, seventeen non-identical. When Lange compared the two groups he discovered that in only two cases did a non-identical twin of a criminal have a criminal record; among the identical twins, ten out of thirteen did.

When he investigated each pair of identical twins the parallels between their lives became still more apparent. Almost invariably Lange found that the brother of a convicted identical twin showed signs of a similar criminal tendency himself. Although out of touch for years, the twin of a professional burglar of quarrelsome disposition turned out himself to be a professional burglar with a reputation for violence. The identical twin of a man imprisoned for company fraud was discovered to have specialized in fraud and confidence tricks himself. A homosexual in trouble for exploiting older men had an identical twin doing the same thing in another part of Germany. Lange concluded in his book, which he entitled Crime as Destiny, that these identical twins acted as they did, not primarily because of their environment, but because of inner laws of heredity determining their tendency to crime.

Five years after Langes book appeared in Leipzig, Charles Kray, a twenty-six-year-old second-hand clothes-dealer from Hoxton, was preparing to leave on a buying trip to the West Country. Most of the cockney dealers liked to stick to the Home Counties, but Charles Kray was a wanderer: by going farther afield he hoped to have Dorset and Somerset to himself. He had his wad of ready money, his old-clothes bag, his gold scales and was planning to catch the Monday morning express to Bristol with his partner, an Irishman named Sonny Kenny.

Charles was small and dapper, and everything about him gleamed; his greased-back hair, his sharp black shoes and his quick smile. People in Hoxton said the Krays were gipsy folk, descended from horse-dealers who had settled here in the poorest part of London. Charles had the mistrustful dark eyes of a gipsy. So had his father, Jimmy Kray. The old man had kept a barrow in Petticoat Lane, and was a wanderer too. Otherwise, father and son were very different.

Jimmy was an East End character: according to Charles, he was A good-looking old boy. Bigger than me with thick grey hair. He always wore a white silk stock tied around his neck and was proud of his appearance. In those days the men of the East End were very vain. He was a fighter and a drinker and was scared of no man living. He must have drunk with every villain who came out of Hoxton and Bethnal Green and hed fight them too. When he fought he never cared what happened. He was called Mad Jimmy Kray.

Charles was cleverer than his wild old father. His mother had been in service with a well-off family in Highgate, a careful woman who spent her time worrying about her husband and keeping the family together. In many ways Charles resembled her: he was deferential, always careful to keep out of trouble and had a taste for money. He was no fighter but a talker with an instinct for buying and selling; in his teens he had started working on his own account. By twenty he was making a good living and generally considered one of the finest pesterers around: for the door-to-door dealer, pestering is the basis of success.

His younger brother says of him, Hed always be polite and never bullied but he knew what people would do for money. As soon as he found anyone with something to sell hed keep on pestering until he got it. By rights Charles should be a stone-rich man today. Gold buying went with old clothes buying. Once I had asked the lady of the house if she had any clothes to sell, Id say, Excuse me, madam, but I wondered if youd any gold or silver youve no use for. The first time theyd say no they hadnt, and Id say, It doesnt matter at all, madam, but it so happens Ill be passing back this way in half an hour and call to see if youve found anything. Itll be no trouble. A bloody lie, of course. But then you gotta tell a few lies. Thats business. And when you came back youd usually find theyd got you something.

In the mid thirties, silver was fetching two shillings and sixpence per ounce; eighteen-carat gold seven pounds an ounce. I always sold to Abe Sokolok in Black Lion Yard, off Whitechapel Road, every Sunday morning, him being Yiddish. Most weeks Id be making twenty or thirty pounds from the gold alone.

This was wealth in the East End, where family income averaged seventeen shillings a week; and Charles had a life he thoroughly enjoyed. Ive been a free man. Thats how I like it. I dont believe in working for a Guvnor. Thats a mugs game. But at twenty-four the time had come to marry. With his looks, and his money, he had the pick of the local girls and chose a seventeen-year-old blonde with blue eyes called Violet Lee. They met in a dance-hall in Mare Street, Hackney. After the marriage they moved in with his parents over a shop in Stene Street, Hoxton. She was soon pregnant and the doctors told her to expect twins. Instead she gave birth to a single son, Charles David. She had been eighteen then. Now at twenty-one she was once again expecting.

Charles Kray was not a family man. But when the midwife told him Violet would soon be giving birth, he decided to postpone his trip to Bristol. That Monday morning he went to Kings Cross to explain things to Sonny Kenny before seeing him off. The old Irishman laughed at the idea of Charles of all people sacrificing a good trip for his family; as the train steamed off, he leaned from the carriage window and shouted, My love to Violet. Hope she has those twins this time. Then youll have something to worry about, me boy. That night, 17 October 1934, at 64 Stene Street, Hoxton, Violet Kray surprised the midwife by giving birth to two male children within an hour of one another. The first she called Reginald, the second Ronald.