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The Burden of Proof
Six men, four stolen cars, weapons, gloves, stockings for the faces … Vic Dakin, gang boss, psycho-homosexual and sadist is ready for a bit of business … Dakin’s empire of fear extends from the Soho strip clubs and gambling dens to country house orgies and the blackmail of a lascivious MP. When so many glittering lives hide such sordid private sins, how can an honest copper ever win? Barlow’s fast-paced crime novel is cleverly plotted, horrific and enthralling yet loses none of the insight into the degenerate quirks of society. Praise for The Burden of Proof ‘One of the best crime stories I have ever read – ingeniously plotted, fast-moving, written with insight, sympathy and uncanny authenticity … studded with horrific close-ups of vicious beatings-up’ Sunday Telegraph ‘Violent and highly sensational’ Punch ‘James Barlow is one of the most able thriller writers in the business, with an alarmingly acute eye for the degenerate quirks of society and the knack of unraveling a plot as complicatedly knit as spaghetti’ The Spectator ‘A wild and dizzy tale of crime and vice told at Barlow’s characteristic speed, which is furious …’ New Yorker ‘An outstandingly good “serious” crime novel, all the more enthralling for being moralistic, and with an ominous ending’ The Sunday Times ‘A real sleep-stealer’ The Yorkshire Post ‘Fast, violent and serious-minded’ Birmingham Evening Mail
- GenresCrime
258 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 1970
7 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
James Barlow
50 books5 followersJames Barlow was a British novelist, born on 1 December 1921 in Birmingham, England. The author of thirteen novels and one work of non-fiction, he died suddenly at the age of 51 in Ireland on 30 January 1973.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 6, 2022
I am a bit of a misanthrope myself but my misanthropy pales in comparison to that of James Barlow as exhibited in this 1968 novel. Some reviewers and commentators have compared him to the likes of Rod Liddle but there are some huge differences in that Barlow can write, he would hold rightwing commentators like Liddle in as much contempt as their opposite number and clearly, his misanthropy is actually inspired by a love for humanity unlike reactionary scribes for the tabloid press. Possibly the grimmest British crime novel I have read!
I look forward to re-watching the film adaptation, Villian, starring Richard Burton and Ian McShane. One of the gangsters in the novel, although not the one played by him, is said to resemble Burton by a barrister cross-examining a "dolly bird" who got given the eye by the muscleman!
I look forward to re-watching the film adaptation, Villian, starring Richard Burton and Ian McShane. One of the gangsters in the novel, although not the one played by him, is said to resemble Burton by a barrister cross-examining a "dolly bird" who got given the eye by the muscleman!
September 1, 2018
James Barlow was a Birmingham-born novelist who served as an air gunner with the RAF in WWII. Invalided out of service when he contracted tuberculosis, he faced a long convalescence. He began writing at this time, and after he worked in his native city as, of all things, a water rates inspector, he made the decision to write for a living. His first novel, The Protagonists, was published in 1956, but made little impact. It wasn’t until Term of Trial (1961) that he began to make a decent living from writing, and then more because film director Peter Glenville saw the cinematic potential in the story of an alcoholic school teacher whose career is threatened when he is accused of improper behaviour with a female pupil. The subsequent film had a star-studded cast including Sir Laurence Olivier, Simone Signoret, Sarah Miles, Terence Stamp, Hugh Griffith, Dudley Foster, Thora Hird and Alan Cuthbertson.
Term of Trial was a powerful and controversial film, but clearly had nothing to do with crime fiction. Barlow’s 1968 novel The Burden of Proof was another matter. By the time it was published, the Kray twins’ days as despotic rulers of London’s gangland were numbered. They were arrested on 8th May in that year and the rest, as they say, is history. The Burden of Proof is centred on a Ronnie Kray-style gangster, Vic Dakin. Dakin is psychotic homosexual, devoted equally to his dear old mum and a succession of pliant boyfriends, while finding time to be at the hub of a violent criminal network.
The cast of the subsequent film version of The Burden of Proof was similarly stellar to that of Term of Trial. Villain (1971) starred none other than Richard Burton, Ian McShane, Nigel Davenport, Joss Ackland, Donald Sinden and T.P, McKenna.
Barlow seems to have been a fairly misanthropic fellow who raged at what he believed was a gathering darkness afflicting an England that he once loved. A year after TBOP was published he decided he’d had enough, and decided to relocate to a place to which many Englishmen of a previous generation were sent as a punishment – Van Diemen’s Land, latterly rebranded as Tasmania. Barlow’s departure was accompanied by a fanfare of his own devising, a rancorous demolition job on what he saw as a corrupted and increasingly shallow country – Goodbye England (1969)
Much of Barlow’s intense disgust at what was happening around him spills out onto the pages of TBOP. The crime plot centres on Dakin’s plan to pull off a lucrative wages heist, but this almost becomes secondary to Barlow’s polemic about his homeland being reduced to what he saw as an obscene freak show where morality and integrity were turned on their heads in favour of a mindless and debased popular culture. Re-reading TBOP exactly half a century after it was published, I am astonished by how contemporary his words sound. They could be put in the mouths of many modern alt-right commentators. Given access to today’s social media he would rage like an Old Testament prophet and, just like his modern counterparts, he would enrage and delight in equal measure.
Barlow on Speakers’ Corner and the how the statuary of London acts as a metaphor:
“The small indifferent crowds hung around the rostrums on Sundays, laughing at the remnants of free speech. The pigeons excreted as they stood on the heads of statues of forgotten men of a time despised now by the liberals who knew better …”
Barlow’s 1960s London is portrayed in the bleakest of descriptions:
“London was tired, seedy, cunning, ugly, here and there beautiful. In 1914 it had been at its most powerful; in 1940 at its most heroic. Now, in the 1960s, it was impotent and had the principles and self-importance of an old queer.”
I read Barlow’s cri de cœur about what he clearly saw as the triumph of the metropolitan elite. In a blink, I might have been reading Rod Liddle in one of his rants in The Spectator or The Sunday Times;
“Nobody could do anything now without being accountable to the scorn of the liberal intellectuals in print or on television. England was too articulate at the top. Nobody, even in a Socialist liberal permissive society, had the slightest notion of the wishes of the people, out there beyond the great conversational shop of London.”
In the city which is portrayed as little more than a moral sewer, we have the vile Dakin and his criminal associates; we have an earnest and incorruptible copper, Bob Matthews who Barlow sets up - along with Bob’s mild-mannered and decent wife Mary – as the apotheosis of what England used to be before the plague took hold. We have Gerald Draycott, a dishonest and manipulative MP who flirts with the dangerous world of gambling clubs, casinos, girls-for-hire and drugs-for-sale, but still dreams of becoming a cabinet minister.
Back to the crime story. Dakin’s attempted wage-snatch, described in terrifying detail, does not go according to plan, but such is the depth, ferocity and intensity of the man’s evil, that there are casualties a-plenty beforte he gets his come-uppance. There is also a terrible incident, unconnected and not criminal by intent but more a result of negligence, which is described in horrific detail and left me dry-mouthed with a mixture of pity and shock. Of the people, volunteers, who help with the consequences of the disaster, Barlow says;
“They came when England and London needed them, and sank back into obscurity afterwards while the more important people postured before cameras with their guitars or explained the need to hate Rhodesians, or Arabs, or Israelis, or Americans…”
Nothing else I have read by Barlow comes close to The Burden of Proof in terms of its rage, its disgust and the sheer firepower of words when used by someone who believes he is on a mission. You may be appalled, you may be left thanking whoever you believe in that we live in more ‘enlightened’ times, but if you read this bitter and brilliant novel and don’t experience an emotional jolt then you may well be in a permanent vegetative state.
Term of Trial was a powerful and controversial film, but clearly had nothing to do with crime fiction. Barlow’s 1968 novel The Burden of Proof was another matter. By the time it was published, the Kray twins’ days as despotic rulers of London’s gangland were numbered. They were arrested on 8th May in that year and the rest, as they say, is history. The Burden of Proof is centred on a Ronnie Kray-style gangster, Vic Dakin. Dakin is psychotic homosexual, devoted equally to his dear old mum and a succession of pliant boyfriends, while finding time to be at the hub of a violent criminal network.
The cast of the subsequent film version of The Burden of Proof was similarly stellar to that of Term of Trial. Villain (1971) starred none other than Richard Burton, Ian McShane, Nigel Davenport, Joss Ackland, Donald Sinden and T.P, McKenna.
Barlow seems to have been a fairly misanthropic fellow who raged at what he believed was a gathering darkness afflicting an England that he once loved. A year after TBOP was published he decided he’d had enough, and decided to relocate to a place to which many Englishmen of a previous generation were sent as a punishment – Van Diemen’s Land, latterly rebranded as Tasmania. Barlow’s departure was accompanied by a fanfare of his own devising, a rancorous demolition job on what he saw as a corrupted and increasingly shallow country – Goodbye England (1969)
Much of Barlow’s intense disgust at what was happening around him spills out onto the pages of TBOP. The crime plot centres on Dakin’s plan to pull off a lucrative wages heist, but this almost becomes secondary to Barlow’s polemic about his homeland being reduced to what he saw as an obscene freak show where morality and integrity were turned on their heads in favour of a mindless and debased popular culture. Re-reading TBOP exactly half a century after it was published, I am astonished by how contemporary his words sound. They could be put in the mouths of many modern alt-right commentators. Given access to today’s social media he would rage like an Old Testament prophet and, just like his modern counterparts, he would enrage and delight in equal measure.
Barlow on Speakers’ Corner and the how the statuary of London acts as a metaphor:
“The small indifferent crowds hung around the rostrums on Sundays, laughing at the remnants of free speech. The pigeons excreted as they stood on the heads of statues of forgotten men of a time despised now by the liberals who knew better …”
Barlow’s 1960s London is portrayed in the bleakest of descriptions:
“London was tired, seedy, cunning, ugly, here and there beautiful. In 1914 it had been at its most powerful; in 1940 at its most heroic. Now, in the 1960s, it was impotent and had the principles and self-importance of an old queer.”
I read Barlow’s cri de cœur about what he clearly saw as the triumph of the metropolitan elite. In a blink, I might have been reading Rod Liddle in one of his rants in The Spectator or The Sunday Times;
“Nobody could do anything now without being accountable to the scorn of the liberal intellectuals in print or on television. England was too articulate at the top. Nobody, even in a Socialist liberal permissive society, had the slightest notion of the wishes of the people, out there beyond the great conversational shop of London.”
In the city which is portrayed as little more than a moral sewer, we have the vile Dakin and his criminal associates; we have an earnest and incorruptible copper, Bob Matthews who Barlow sets up - along with Bob’s mild-mannered and decent wife Mary – as the apotheosis of what England used to be before the plague took hold. We have Gerald Draycott, a dishonest and manipulative MP who flirts with the dangerous world of gambling clubs, casinos, girls-for-hire and drugs-for-sale, but still dreams of becoming a cabinet minister.
Back to the crime story. Dakin’s attempted wage-snatch, described in terrifying detail, does not go according to plan, but such is the depth, ferocity and intensity of the man’s evil, that there are casualties a-plenty beforte he gets his come-uppance. There is also a terrible incident, unconnected and not criminal by intent but more a result of negligence, which is described in horrific detail and left me dry-mouthed with a mixture of pity and shock. Of the people, volunteers, who help with the consequences of the disaster, Barlow says;
“They came when England and London needed them, and sank back into obscurity afterwards while the more important people postured before cameras with their guitars or explained the need to hate Rhodesians, or Arabs, or Israelis, or Americans…”
Nothing else I have read by Barlow comes close to The Burden of Proof in terms of its rage, its disgust and the sheer firepower of words when used by someone who believes he is on a mission. You may be appalled, you may be left thanking whoever you believe in that we live in more ‘enlightened’ times, but if you read this bitter and brilliant novel and don’t experience an emotional jolt then you may well be in a permanent vegetative state.
March 2, 2014
Burden of Proof was not as captivating as Identicle. It was drawn out with long narratives of characters having no connection to the book. I occasionally had to glide over some of the more salacious scenes buthe sophistication and descriptive writing style makes it a worthy read.
July 15, 2025
Oh God, this was hard work.
A book of such negativity and so filled with apparent hatred of people in general, that it is difficult not to get dragged down as you read it.
Celine's Journey to the End of the Night is probably its equal for grinding negativity, but that is a great book. The Burden of Proof is not a great book; it isn't even an interesting book hidden in a relentlessly readable potboiler. What it is is an angry man writing some very grim stuff and complaining about the rest of the world while he does so.
Barlow comes across as one of those older people from the 70s and 80s who devoured all the slasher films and pornography they could lay their hands on and then write bitter letters to some right-wing rag about the younger generation while secretly looking forward to revisiting much of that "filth" later.
Horrible!
A book of such negativity and so filled with apparent hatred of people in general, that it is difficult not to get dragged down as you read it.
Celine's Journey to the End of the Night is probably its equal for grinding negativity, but that is a great book. The Burden of Proof is not a great book; it isn't even an interesting book hidden in a relentlessly readable potboiler. What it is is an angry man writing some very grim stuff and complaining about the rest of the world while he does so.
Barlow comes across as one of those older people from the 70s and 80s who devoured all the slasher films and pornography they could lay their hands on and then write bitter letters to some right-wing rag about the younger generation while secretly looking forward to revisiting much of that "filth" later.
Horrible!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews