After seeing this book mentioned in an episode of the Radiotopia podcast Criminal, and hearing that it was available online, I decided to check it out. Ended up reading the entire thing.
I thought my primary reaction would be morbid fascination, but this book is funny as all hell! On the surface it's supposed to be a guide written by a hitmen, for other potential hitmen, but so many of the things in this book are badly written, over the top and absurd, and fall into the category of shitthatdidnthappen.txt that I couldn't help giggling constantly when I was reading it.
Highlights include
- Advice to fill hollow-point bullets with "liquid poison", without specifying what kind of poison LIQUID POISON would be
- Frequent advice to use "flesh coloured" disposable gloves, which I've never seen in my life.
- "Throwaway cars and boats may even become common and you even own your very own plane, through legal methods explained later."
- You can totally kill a mark efficiently by ordering a puffer fish for your own personal salt-water aquarium and poisoning him with that, or putting a venomous snake in his letterbox in the hope that he'll get a heart attack and die, because idk, Colour of Night was a documentary. (This snake method wouldn't work on herpetologists, or Australians.)
- The part in the book where the narrator speaks to a police officer, asking him "under the guise of a writer", how someone could carry out a hit. The cop describes a fairly plausible, un-elaborate method, which the narrator then discounts as useless because it didn't involve enough pufferfish poison or home made silencers
- all the people in the book to be assassinated are fat and smoke huge cigars while watching television
- Apparently in the 80s dynamite was just sitting around at construction sites and you could just walk in and grab it
- apparently in the 80s quicksand was also a valid and accessible way to dispose of bodies
The most disturbing bit in the book is the end section, on women. Unsurprisingly, it lacks nuance. And I quote:
because of their uncanny ability to get into places and situations a man might find hard to duplicate, because of their deceitful, "game-playing" natures, and because a woman can be twice as vicious as a man, a woman can be a better hired executioner than a man.
Fortunately for the world, a woman usually makes only one man her target, and the nesting instinct quickly takes her off the street and ties her down to the little world of babies, laundry and housework she creates and protects for her own. Unfortunately, even a hit man cannot deny that what women have to offer is a basic necessity.
Well ok sure, if you say so.
There's other comedy to be had, like the idea that a guy's scar on his...bum? left a print on the toilet seat? And he got convicted? God I don't even know. But ignoring the comedy, there's the fact that this book was technically used as a manual for murder at least once. How does this do as an instructional piece of writing? Well...it's not very good. Most of the useful information could be found in your average crime novel, and there's a lot of extraneous, ridiculous crap as well. A lot of the practical advice is also extremely out of date in a post September 11th world. There's no way you could book flights through a travel agent without providing any form of ID, for one. Most of the anecdotes about hitmen the author knows sound extremely fake, including but not limited to the very stupid and offensive story about a "full blooded Indian" who's so into torture that he comes in his own pants while putting the screws on someone. As an instruction manual for crime it's less accurate and useful than the significantly more plausible "Pop A Cap In Yo Ass" by Ben Watt and Estelle, which at least provides solid shoplifting tips.
I'm not sure if I've been put on some kind of watch list for reading this, but by god was it entertaining.