How a promising sculptor turned his back on art to control 10% of the UK cannabis supply
The smuggling memoir is a niche but crowded genre that lives in the shadow of Howard Marks. His million-selling Mr Nice might not have been the original but it was certainly the first to dominate the bestseller lists, and it set certain conventions. Our hero must be intelligent and cheeky. There can be little hard violence, few hard drugs, few deaths. Run-ins with the law must have a light quality. Nothing too heavy, in other words. There must be no risk of the readers coming away with the impression that they are dealing with anything other than a lovable scamp.
Francis Morland’s autobiography, The Art of Smuggling, “as told to” the barrister Jo Boothby, is an entertaining addition to the tradition, which doesn’t stray far from the path. Morland’s selling point is that rather than being an East End scrapper (or Welsh physicist, like Marks) he is firmly upper-middle class, and was also one of the first to get deep into the cannabis game. Although he is now in his ninth decade, the book’s focus is the 60s and early 70s, and it serves as a snapshot of that time for a certain glamorous milieu.
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