Ronnie's Looking For Trouble: Roddy Lumsden Reviews

Not for me, I think, the life of the undercover cop. In various tales in his lively and very readable memoir Ronnie's Looking For Trouble (Mainstream £9.99), Brummie policeman 'Ronnie Howard' (not his real name, but apparently the name he used on the job) has to pretend to be a drug dealer, a fence, and a hit man. He even has to hone the art of plastering so he and his mate can keep an eye on ruthless and warring Liverpudlian drug dealers while refurbishing houses in Toxteth. But a spell of porridge, in the guise of a child abuser, and the befriending of two recidivists bent on raping schoolgirls is a task beyond most.

It goes without saying that Howard is no longer a cop. Still in his forties, he was pushed to resign over an unsubstantiated claim that he had pocketed a small amount of cannabis during a drugs raid. The truth may be that undercover cops flare bright and end their careers young – they takes risks, cross their seniors, disappear from regular duty, make strong use of informants. They can become liabilities. Perhaps Howard has reason to badmouth the force, but his evidence against his former employers is ample and quite shocking. Again and again in this book, the police come off badly.

Often, he explains, the preferred way to end a campaign of surveillance is to quietly intercept the villain. If the fence or drug dealer can be pulled over, driving nervily to the ubiquitous country pub car-park to do the deal with the man he doesn't know is from CID, all the better. No need for the pay-off, no need for a showy hit, with cops surrounding the car. And, most importantly, no need for word to get round that the police are using undercover officers in the area. At least twice in his career though, Howard's careful work was scuppered by senior officers who could not resist seeing their picture in the local paper, gloating with the recovered booty.

Other alleged black marks against the police: a shameful climate of drinking on duty among Birmingham officers in the 1980s; shunning and punishment for officers who stick by the rules; a tendency to string out operations against drug dealers and thieves, to buy time in the pub; and, most shocking, if less prurient, Howard claims a constant tight-fistedness on behalf of the police authorities which leaves officers in danger, using out-dated equipment in undercover operations.

Howard comes across as cocky but passionate, unconventional but successful. His jokes (or those of his ghost writer) are not going to find him a new career in stand-up! He admits to being a workaholic, which costs him his marriage, and a fitness freak, pounding the streets and pulling weights when his fellow officers are sinking pints. Occasionally, the narrative is clouded by being condensed, and by the stories not always running in the order they happened.

The best bits of this volume are the detailed descriptions of undercover jobs. An extended section of the book is given over to one case, where Howard befriends an excitable Teesside club-owner turned drug dealer who hires him as muscle to accompany him on a trip to California to buy a large amount of pure ecstasy powder. The hapless dealer is never going to get the drugs into the clubs, but Howard needs to make sure the powder is bought and brought home so the sting can be stung.

Ronnie's Looking For Trouble is a quick, racy read. Take it with a pinch of salt if you like, or wonder at the sort of character who thrives on taking such risks and wearing such masks – an alternative actor if you like. Either way, it's a good addition to the genre of true crime, something Scottish publishers are doing very well these days.