Annals of the Dead: Bruce Reynolds, Artist

Everyone has a guilty secret and mine (well, one of them) is that I like to read obituaries. They are often my favorite part of the daily newspaper (which I read, by the way, the old fashioned way, by holding it in my hands and getting newsprint on my fingers.)  I haven’t yet read Marilyn Johnson’s, “The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries,” but in a way I don’t feel like I need to. I think I know what all the pleasures are: peoples’ lives, and their deaths, do follow a story line and are never—in retrospect and in the hands of a good obit writer—as bland as we often think our own days are.
   And those are the obituaries of regular folk. The famous are just like you and me, only more so. But sometimes you do come across an obituary of someone who took a decidedly different path in life. So let us now praise—sort of—Bruce Reynolds, who died this past week in England.
   He was a criminal, a thief, and it seems only superficially remorseful—he wrote a book about his most famous crime, what came to be known in England and around the world as the Great Train Robbery. According to New York Times obit writer Bruce Weber, on the morning of Aug. 8, 1963, Reynolds and “a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.”
   They made off with the money to a nearby farmhouse that the robbers had purchased ahead of time. Reynolds would flee to Belgium, then Toronto, then Mexico, where he lived the high life for five years before being apprehended. Seems someone part of the plan was supposed to destroy evidence in the farmhouse—or perhaps burn the whole thing down—but failed to do so; police detectives traced the robbers there and found the place covered in fingerprints. So it was only a matter of time before Reynolds—who was already known to London police as a thief—was captured when, having run out of money in Mexico, he returned to England hoping to make another score.  
   The robbery was pulled off without guns, but one of the gang got itchy when the train driver was uncooperative and bludgeoned him with an iron bar—the driver didn’t die, but never worked again, according to Weber. It’s interesting that Reynolds recalled this—that “the driver got whacked”—not the failure to destroy evidence in the farmhouse as the only thing that went wrong in what he otherwise described as a masterpiece (his “Sistine Chapel,” he called it).
    An artist, after all, is someone obsessed in a way with some vision of beauty, no matter how socially transgressive.  So let’s give Bruce Reynolds credit as one of those characters you might have thought existed only in fiction who has no interest in actually harming anyone, but only in a kind of criminal artistry. He would spend ten years in prison, but published a memoir entitled, “The Autobiography of a Thief,” and enjoyed a kind of celebrity in England.
   And Reynold’s obituary includes the kind of detail that more than pays for the price of a newspaper:  a detective who pursued Reynolds after he fled England tracked him to the south of France and was scanning for the thief with binoculars at a beach full of sunbathers when he was arrested by French police as a peeping Tom.

   And of course there is something pleasingly quaint about a train robbery. In this era of identity theft, cyber hacking, and celebrity Ponzi schemes, it is somehow redeeming to read about a fellow who stole his money the old fashioned way.