The candid killer / By Jean Giltene ; translated by Christina Stead

"Romeo Romani is a professional killer, but he lacks courage almost on principle. Tornado is a hold-up expert, but he faints easily. Hot-Dog spends his time making infernal machines and time-bombs out of old clocks which always go off either too early of too late, and thus keeps his friends in a state of perpetual alarm. Little-Musso is an honest but unlucky mobster, an ever-present aid to more trouble. Romeo Romani, notorious gangster, writes these memoirs during a rest-cure in Sing-Sing. He acknowledges quite freely that he is timid and kind-hearted; he tells us of his first unlucky encounters with safe-deposit vaults. Although he cut a wide swathe with the girls back in Naples, he was unlucky in New York with Sue the Senator's secretary and Jessie, the dangerous woman. He consoles himself in a happy family life but alas, during the First Communion luncheon for his little boy, the one at which he tasted his last spaghetti as a free man, a stray bullet finished off Eugenia, his two-gun mother-in-law. This truthful travesty, with its cowardly and human heroes, presents a highly original brand of humour compounded of hilariously comic episodes in which the principal actors are a group of fascinating characters who might have stepped out of the pages of Runyon." --Cover verso.