The Good Guys Wear Black: The True-life Heroes of Britain's Armed Police

by Steve Collins

SO19, the Metropolitan Police Special Firearms Wing is an awesome squad of gunfighters who daily defend the public from evil. Here Sergeant Steve Collins, who led Black Team, the hardest and most renowned team within the unit, tells their story.

Yardies, international drug barons, IRA enforcers, celebrity South London gangsters and hitmen have all been taken off the streets by the true life heroes of SO19 either in handcuffs or in bodybags.

The tensions and camaraderie of a team who daily risk death has never been captured so vividly on the page.

Genres: Crime, Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated authors publishing as Steve Collins.

Reviews

[Justyna]

This book is not about SO19, it is about Steve Collins and the way he wanted to paint himself, that is ego-driven, self-admired, over-weight, constantly watching TV boozer, that despises any interests, that you think would be normal for a person choosing this kind of job, like physical exercises or firearms. All this adds to his very special talent of describing absolutely regular SWAT jobs in totally unbelievable/unlikely to be true way. Not that I think, they didn't happened, because they are jobs, you would expect, just Collins describes them like a mythomaniac:
"As he passed defiantly by, I smiled and pointed to my face, uttering those immortal words: Terrorism stops here!"
Bollocks!

There are few descriptions of first training, some insides from briefings and actions, but sometimes it's very hard to track what is going on. Collins likes to mix things that he is direct observer of with imaginations of what possibly happened in the past with presumptions of what is happening in other places to other people. Dynamic of action descriptions is weird, like when in the moment of a breach he seems stop and stare at one of the bodies, describing all its details, and you already forgot any breach was proceeding.

The worst is, that the most of the book are to-be-funny-but-not-really anecdotes about farting, drinking, weird hat of one of the colleagues, etc. Things that happen to all of us and at the time of happening could be humorous, but so irrelevant, that we just never even try to mention it in conversation with friends or spouse. That's all you can hope for, if you were looking for details about life of the team.

I really wanted to like this book, but it was just a waste of time.

[Matthew Okuhara]

Possibly more about the author than the police. However this book shares the stories of a clearly capable and resourceful police officer.

[Stefan]

“Good Guys Wear Black” is Steve Collins highly readable memoir of his time in SO19 (the London Metropolitan Police’s Special Firearms Unit). Collins did a great job at conveying the variety and complexity of the various hostage, terrorism and arrest operations his team encountered (particularly the massive drug bust operation involving a large freighter) and how they pulled them off in a professional manner. The detailed descriptions (equipment, tactics, training and unit structure), candid tone and well-written narrative made this a very interesting and informative read.

[Elliot Richards]

Is this a memoir or something else? If it's intended to be a biography it fails as there's very little personal story here; as such it's difficult to relate to anything written here. As a result I thought this was a simplistic and dull read from start to finish with way too many exclamation marks resembling tabloid journalism. It's mainly anecdotal, recounting various assignments. Weaving a personal story throughout would add greatly to the book. Whilst the service of these armed police is no doubt of a high calibre, the writing of this book is anything but.

[Trevor]

Quite a decent read, this.

It's not quite an autobiography as there's a lot of anecdotes about colleagues and former team members but the premise is basically the story of Steve Collins who enters the Police Force and ends up on SO19.

[John Lane]

I really enjoyed this novel as it gave me an insight into the workings of the Police unit SO19 the firearms team a great read