Wrong Side of the Law: True Stories of Crime

by Edward Butts

Overview

Bestselling true crime author Edward Butts presents a rogues’ gallery of desperadoes whose crimes range from robbery to murder.

English bank robbers on the run turn up in Newfoundland. A legendary Nova Scotia detective matches wits with smugglers. In the West the Mounties track down bandits and rustlers. Vancouver police officers hunt down the bank-robbing Hyslop Gang in the 1930s. A decade later the Polka Dot Gang rampages across Southern Ontario. The Newton Brothers’ Gang, outlaws from Texas, engage in a gunfight with bank guards on the streets of Toronto, and a former Canadian Pacific Railway engineer masterminds a sensational kidnapping in Colorado.

No matter where the atrocities were committed and no matter what the circumstances, these individuals all had one thing in common: they lived on the wrong side of the law.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459709522
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	08/20/2013
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Edward Butts is the author of several historical true crime books, including The Desperate Ones (shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award), Running with Dillinger, Line of Fire, and Murder. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.

Table of Contents

1. Newfoundland Desperadoes: A Rogues Gallery
2. Badmen on the Border: Six Guns and Running Irons
3. The Smugglers of Nova Scotia: The Tale of the Four Sisters
4. The Newton Gang: Texas Bandits in Canada
5. Sydney Lass (subtitle to come)
6. Verne Sankey: Kidnapper
7. The Hyslop Gang: Suicide and the Hangman
8. The Polka Dot Gang: “A Strange Fraternity of Men”
9. Stanley Buckowski: The Long Road to the Gas Chamber
10. Joseph McAuliff: Lethal Pursuit
11. Lucien Rivard: The Great Escape
12. Micky McArthur: (subtitle to come)

Editorial Reviews

Ellis Award–nominated Butts (The Desperate Ones) offers a dozen proofs that Canadians are not an inherently law-abiding people, although if these histories are any indication, Canadians do seem to be profoundly deficient in the art of getting away; however, foreign criminals trying their hands in Canada do not fare much better. From bootlegging to kidnapping, from smuggling to common murder, from orchestrated bank robberies to car theft, no crime seems beneath the criminal element in the Dominion of Canada, or beyond its ambitions, as revealed by Butts’s book. The author writes about obscure criminals and those who made the FBI’s most-wanted list, crooks of depressingly plebeian ambition and those whose connections reach into the loftiest offices of the nation. Butts’s prose is unremarkable but serviceable, and his focus on criminals who got caught—including some, like habitual escapees Rivard and Buckowski, who get caught several times—lends the narrative a reassuring “justice served” tone. One gets the sense that Butts could compose any number of these studies, maintaining a laudable level of competence that his subjects so often failed to achieve. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

. . . Edward Butts’ very entertaining Wrong Side of the Law: True Stories of Crime will surprise many readers who didn’t know this peaceful country had such a rich criminal history.

Canadian Lawyer Magazine

. . . Edward Butts’ very entertaining Wrong Side of the Law: True Stories of Crime will surprise many readers who didn’t know this peaceful country had such a rich criminal history.

From the Publisher