Jake Arnott
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jake Arnott is a British novelist who was born in Buckinghamshire in 1961 and now lives in North London.
Having left school at 16 and drifted through various jobs including a labourer, mortuary technician, artist's model and theatrical agency assistant, Arnott became an actor with the Red Ladder Company in Leeds and appeared as a mummy in the The Mummy.
His first three novels form a loose trilogy.
His first novel The Long Firm was published in 1999 and tells of Harry Starks, a homosexual East End gangster in the 1960s based on the Kray twins. A notable feature is that the story is told from five different points of view. It was later serialised on BBC television starring Derek Jacobi, Phil Daniels and Mark Strong.
His second novel He Kills Coppers was published in 2001 and tells of a criminal on the run, based on real life cop killer Harry Roberts, the tale starting in 1966, the year of England's World Cup triumph, through to the Margaret Thatcher era, the Greenham Common protests of the 1980s and the Poll Tax riots.
His third novel truecrime (2003) takes up the story of a gangster found dead at Starks' Spanish villa at the end of The Long Firm. The dead man's daughter wants to flush out Harry Starks, whom she suspects of the murder (she is an actress and uses the making of a film about old time British gangsters as a means of tempting his appearance).
His latest novel Johnny Come Home (2006) shifts from a focus on the criminal underworld to the early 1970s with a plot involving The Angry Brigade and a glam rock star inspired by Gary Glitter.
Johnny Come Home had been withdrawn from sale in the UK due to the presence of a villainous former bandleader named Tony Rocco; there is a real former bandleader of that name, who objected to the character's name. The book has now been reissued with the character's name changed to Timothy Royal. [1]
