To Hell in a Handcart
Richard Littlejohn exposes the madness of modern Britain in this thrill-packed rollercoaster ride of a novel, bursting with all the humour and irreverence that have made him Britain’s No 1 newspaper columnist.What right do you have to protect your family and property from violent criminals? Richard Littlejohn has explored this and other burning social issues in his work as a journalist. Now he takes it even further in a fast-paced powerhouse of a novel, part polemic, part comedy, part tragedy.Mickey French is just an ordinary bloke, an ex-cop struggling to look after his family as self-righteous do-gooders and bungling bureaucrats bring the country to its knees. But Mickey’s life is turned upside down when he is attacked in his own home and forced to defend himself. His arrest for murder is front-page news, and soon the whole nation is watching as he battles for justice, lost in a maze of dodgy lawyers, politically correct police officers, bogus asylum-seekers, self-publicising politicians, shameless journalists and rabble-rousing shock-jocks.
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Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2001
Copyright © Richard Littlejohn
Richard Littlejohn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008209094
Ebook Edition © November 2016 ISBN: 9780007387991
Version: 2016-11-17
‘Irascible, irreverent and totally compulsive’
Daily Mail
‘Wounding, funny, mocking, unfair and a tonic … I admire Littlejohn, love his writing and am amazed that 1990s Britain has only produced one such satirist.’
Matthew Parris, The Times
‘The only serious competitor P. J. O’Rourke has.’
Independent
For Wendy
Contents
The Tigani, Romania
The Tigani doesn’t feature on many maps. It isn’t sign–posted. The Tigani doesn’t advertise. Strangers are rare in these parts.
The Tigani – Gypsyland. Bandit country, home to six hundred close-knit families.
The police never ventured here. There had been no official law enforcement since the fall of Communism and the death of the dictator Ceausüescu. When the men in the black Mercedes S500 had stopped en route to ask directions, the non-gypsy locals questioned their sanity.
Their $100,000 limousine passed silently along the dust road, its computer-assisted air suspension soaking up the potholes like a sponge absorbing spilt milk. The trademark double-glazed smoked glass of the Daimler-Benz company concealed the faces of the driver and his three passengers.
It had cost the men in the Merc $100 and a carton of Marlboro to persuade a taxi driver from a town thirty miles away to lead them to the turning for Gypsyland. They followed his rotting Romanian-built Renault saloon for over an hour before he pulled off the single carriageway, pointed them towards their destination and wished them good luck. Then he was off in the opposite direction in a cloud of dust.
It had taken them just over three hours to cover the ninety miles from the Romanian capital of Bucharest, the final leg of a journey begun in Moscow.
As the car made its stately progress along the unmetalled lane, it was surrounded by raggedy, bare-footed, snot-nosed children and their semi-feral pets. Further back stood a gaggle of women aged from fifteen to seventy-five, wearing traditional Romanian peasant costume, long skirts, woollen jackets and headscarves. The younger women clutched babies in swaddling clothes.
They passed a group of men, all dressed in the familiar Eastern European uniform of denims, sweatshirts bearing the names and logos of provincial English football clubs, trainers on their feet. They pulled on untipped cigarettes and watched, warily.
