It is a pity there are getting to be so many places that I can never go back to, but all the same, I do not think it is much fun a man being respectable all his life.


Thus begins Don't Call Me a Crook!, a memoir of a 1920s youth thoroughly, noisily and lawlessly lived. Bob Moore, a Glaswegian, was a marine engine, occasional building superintendent and ramblin' man. "I have been round the world seven times, and I have been shipwrecked three times, and I have spent £100,000," Moore boasts. In Don't Call Me a Crook he recounts pitched battles with Chinese bandits, life in gangster-infested Chicago, and decadent orgies aboard a millionaire's yacht.


Don't Call Me a Crook! A Scotsman's Tale of World Travel, Whisky and Crime is a hardboiled-noir memoir. It's picaresque, perverse, and darkly funny. A tribute to one man's triumph over the law, morals and sobriety, it's a lost confession that will be crowned a classic.