Death of a Bovver Boy

Carolus Deene’s housekeeper, the stoic Mrs. Stick, announces one evening that her husband has seen the body of a youth lying in a ditch with his hair shorn and his wrists slashed. Carolus knows that he has, at last, met a supreme challenge to test his powers of deduction. The redoubtable schoolmaster-turned-detective then becomes involved in a lively series of adventures infiltrating England’s provincial cockney underworld and gaining insight into the dead boy’s unhappy background and surroundings. Realizing that it is all too easy to blame the obvious suspects, skinheads and greasers, Carolus must call upon his ingenuity and determination to persevere. One of Leo Bruce’s most exciting novels, Death of a Bovver Boy gives the reader an insight into the milieu of rebellious 1970s England, a world where prejudice is the order of the day and hostility and violence are the only means of survival.