Bad Business: Professional Crime in Modern Britain - Tapa dura

A potent insight into the chaotic lives of assorted crooks and a modern world of wheeling and dealing. (Newcastle upon Tyne Journal)

This is a superb little book, short, pithy and engaging. Hobbs is without doubt Britain's most insightful and penetrating criminological ethnographer, and he uses his skill to provide an extremely useful service...my advice to all interested academics and students is to get a copy, read it, and keep it as a principal guide book to take with you on your theoretical excursions into the subject of professional crime. (International Journal of Sociology and Law)

Very few studies tell us in detail what delinquents do in their daily round of activity and what they think about themselves, society, and their occupation. Dick Hobbs has provided us with one such study. (The Times Higher Education Supplement)

His book contains the thrills of voyeuristic participation in a world of almost untrammelled opportunities for hedonistic pleasure, with the frisson of realisation that burglaries and robberies are the price we pay as victims. This book conveys a fascinating if disturbing sense of the complex, messy lives of those in the bad business. (Times Literary Supplement)

'Bad Business' is a cross-over book, one that will be accessible to the dons of both the criminal and the criminological disciplines. (London Review of Books)

'this is a very good book about some very Bad Business...Hobbs says he 'wanted to write a book that was accessible both to academics and to a general readership' (p.vii). Overall, I think he's done the business.' (Sociology)

'Dick Hobbs has succeeded at every level...this is a very good book. It is written with confidence and gusto, in a way which makes the subjects - from the men of violence Dannny, Chris and Jimmy, to Moira the drug dealer and the dodgy car world of the Fat Boys - come to life.' (New Law Journal)

'Hobbs has made use of his remarkable connections within the criminl world to explore the motivations and aspirations of those involved in serious crime...provides a vividly direct picture of their aims, purposes, successes and failures in serious criminal activity.For those who wish to understand the rationale of the criminal, there is much to learn from this book.'

'The book also provides a thorough analysis of the role played by violence in the development of professional criminal careers, and focuses on mascunalinity which favours such development... this excellent book may lead readers to formulate hypotheses and draw general comparisons of an international nature.'

Written by a leading commentator on the culture of crime and criminality, this is a hard-hitting and disturbing insight into the activities and attitudes of professional criminals. The book is based upon interviews with generations of criminals whose activities range from violence, intimidation, and protection rackets through to drug dealing and car theft. Professional criminals talk in graphic detail about their violent methods and their often ruthless attitudes to those who stand in their way. Their stories show a picture of a community where criminals have an elevated status, where violence is seen as a way of life, and prison is an occupational hazard - not a deterrent.

The author spent three years at street level talking to the people whose stories appear in this book, and he presents us with a picture of a world beyond the usual glamorous, media friendly images of the gangster: a place where it is a struggle to thrive in a dangerous and highly competitive environment.