Thaddeus Russell is the Texas Guinan of American history. Although unaccountably absent from these pages, Guinan was a chorus girl, silent-film star and saloon keeper who found fame and fortune defying the law during Prohibition, when she greeted the patrons at the 300 Club, the speakeasy she ran on the west side of Manhattan, with her catch-phrase, ‘Hello, suckers!’ The sense of being taken for a ride, and being expected to like it, is one that Russell’s readers have ample grounds to share.

Like Guinan, Russell has plenty of what used to be called ‘moxie’, though chutzpah – especially when defined as the mentality that lets a man who has murdered his parents throw himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he’s now an orphan – might