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'I first met Robert Allerton in prison, where he was captive and I was not... He was a powerful broad-shouldered Cockney [who] had spent his childhood in poverty and much of his manhood in prison; and he had a long record of violent crime.' Tony Parker, from his IntroductionTony Parker's first book The Courage of His Convictions (1962), constructed out of his candid and illuminating dialogues with career criminal Robert Allerton (credited as co-author), is a stunning work that displays all the skills and virtues Parker would bring to his subsequent career as an 'oral historian' of the lives of society's marginal figures. 'This intimate autobiography is a revelation - it provides the first psychological insight into the mentality of that frightening, mysterious and pathetic product of our society, the professional criminal.' Arthur Koestler

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Tony Parker was born in Stockport on June 25 1923, the son of a bookseller. His mother died when he was 4. He began to write poems and plays in his late teens. Called up to military service early in the Second World War he declared himself a conscientious objector and, in lieu, was sent to work at a coal-mine in the North East, where he observed conditions and met people who influenced him hugely. After the war he began to work as a publisher's representative and, voluntarily, as a prison visitor - the latter another important stimulus to his subsequent writings. After Parker happened to make the acquaintance of a BBC radio producer and imparted his growing interest in the lives, opinions and self-perceptions of the prisoners he had met, he was given the opportunity to record an interview with a particular convict for broadcast on the BBC. The text of the interview was printed in the Listener, and spotted by the publishers Hutchinson as promising material for a book. This duly emerged as The Courage of His Convictions (1962), for which Parker and the career criminal 'Robert Allerton' (a pseudonym) were jointly credited as authors. Over the next 30 years Parker would publish 18 discrete works, most of them 'oral histories' based on discreetly edited but essentially verbatim interview transcripts. He died in 1996 (though one further work, a study of his great American counterpart Studs Terkel, appeared posthumously.)

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