Chris Pickard Audiobooks

The Great Train Robber: the inside story of Britain's most notorious heist

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

63 listener ratings

Who is Chris Pickard?

The entry that brings Chris Pickard into our catalogue is a collaboration, and saying so plainly is the fairest way to introduce it. The Great Train Robber: My Autobiography is a first-person account of Britain’s most notorious mail train robbery and the long, strange life that followed it, set down with Ronnie Biggs. The my in the title belongs to Biggs. The craft of shaping a life into a narrative is the work carrying Pickard’s name.

That role, the collaborator who turns testimony into a book, is a genuine literary skill and a mostly invisible one. It demands an ear for another person’s cadence and the discipline to stay out of the way, and what the finished thing sounds like depends almost entirely on that ear.

Our catalogue tags the title under science and engineering alongside biography, which is plainly a filing accident. Read it as true crime and memoir, sitting somewhere between confession and social history.

Chris Pickard in audiobooks

The Great Train Robber: My Autobiography is due to join our shelves rather than already sitting there. It runs close to twelve hours, generous room for a life with this many turns in it.

Nick Reynolds narrates, in a register suited to a telling that is confessional as much as it is criminal. Long-form first-person crime writing depends on that balance, and a reader who leans too hard on the sensational can flatten the reflection out of it.

Listener scores are already strong ahead of its arrival here. If true crime told from the inside appeals, mark this one and browse what is available below.