description: Sometimes only the most hackneyed cliché will do: there's no getting away from it - Ronald Biggs is a legend in his own lifetime. A member of the gang who carried out the Great Train Robbery, he has come to personify the notoriety, excitement and drama of what was the biggest and most daring crime in British history. No one has run more rings round Scotland Yard , nor eluded more bounty hunters. Today he lives in Rio de Janeiro as a law-abiding citizen but a fugitive from British justice.Just after three o'clock on the morning of Thursday 8 August 1963, on a stretch of railway track in Buckinghamshire, sixteen men ambushed the Glasgow-to-London mail train. Their total haul that night was £2,631,784 - worth over £26 million at today's rates.Having made a successful getaway from the scene of the crime, Biggs - along with most of the other gang members - was subsequently captured; he received a thirty-year jail sentence. But within fifteen months he had made a spectacular escape from Wandsworth Prison, and he has been on the loose ever since.In 'Odd Man Out' Ronald Biggs speaks openly about the robbery and his years on the run, and for the first time divulges just how he has eluded justice for so long. He also talks about his life now, in Brazil, where he remains a hero of popular mythology, courted by the music and film industries, the media and the whole nation. His account is both revealing and highly entertaining; here is the tale of a man who is truly the quintessential lovable rogue of our time - and perhaps all time. A rogue who remains, thirty years on, the odd man out.
language: English
title: Odd Man Out
titlecomplete: Odd Man Out
ratings_count: 32
publisher: Pan MacMillan