How not to steal a million

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ crackled the voice over the Buckinghamshire police radio in the pre-dawn light of Thursday 8 August 1963. ‘They’ve stolen a train.’ Fifty years on, we can’t believe it either. And to the extent that we do, our fascination with the Great Train Robbery shows no sign of fading. It’s Britain’s real-life Wizard of Oz — no matter how familiar the tale, we can never resist savouring it just one more time.

By this new book’s own admission, the ‘definitive’ of its subtitle cannot mean ‘statement of fact’, a single, unarguable version of the the truth. Too many years have passed, too few of the participants’ memories have stayed immune to natural frailty and media pay-cheques. Even the gang’s self-styled leader Bruce Reynolds admits he finds it hard to distinguish his own recollection from received myth — what he calls ‘the product’. Some of which he created himself, as with Piers Paul Read’s excellent 1976 book The Train Robbers (to be republished later this year), a collaboration with the gang members, flogged to the publishers on the ker-ching ‘revelation’ that ex-Nazi Otto Skorzeny had bankrolled the heist.