The Best Heist and Con Artist Books

IIn 1974, I invested in what I was assured was a wonderful opportunity, an exciting Canadian venture called Aquablast, which was presented to me by the vice-president of the Bank of Boston. It turned out to be a disaster for all of us who had invested in it. I lost my house, I stood down from Parliament, and my wife Mary took a teaching post at Cambridge so we could keep a roof over our heads.

There are certain sensations like feeling that you have been taken inside. Your first reaction is disbelief. Again, if you’re honest with yourself, there will be embarrassment. And ultimately angry, hot, and sleepless, as you begin to understand that the swindler is not just taking your money. He is taking away your respect.

From that anger emerged Harvey Metcalfe, the villain of my first novel. Not a penny more, not a penny lessAnd the four men who decided to get back what was stolen from them. Not a penny more, and not a penny less. That line has always felt to me like both a promise and a threat.

Fifty years later, I guess the con artist has never gone out of fashion. Whatever the case, the breed has evolved. The sharp-suited swindler is mixed up with the tech founder who has a blood-testing machine that doesn’t work, and the financier whose Ponzi scheme has swallowed his own friends’ savings.

I’ve chosen five books here, and let me tell you right away that the hard part was stopping at five. Some are about con artists. Some are about robberies. The difference matters. The deceiver lives by deception; He talks about your wallet and your confidence. A man who commits robbery lives by craft, preparation, timing and courage. What these five have in common is that each of them found a new path and each of them taught me something that I used later.

gold Finger (1959) by Ian Fleming

When I was a young man, just before I went to Oxford, I was in a store in Leamington, Hampshire, and I saw this book for sixpence, second-hand, called gold Finger. That was my first introduction to Ian Fleming. Wow, did I like it?
I liked his hero very much. I loved his villains. Auric Goldfinger was absolutely amazing, and Oddjob was the worst, right? You were simply infatuated with him. Ian Fleming was a great storyteller and a truly original man.

The plot is based on the robbery of the gold reserves at Fort Knox. It is so big, so impossible, so American that for many years thereafter every thriller writer tried to imitate it on this scale and no one managed to do so. This film made the rest of the world crazy about it. The book reached there first.

I was seventeen years old at that time. Bond is saved. Here we are, almost seventy years later, and they’re still discussing who will be the new Bond. That’s what I call staying alive.

“The Million Pound Bank-Note” (1893) by mark twain

“The Million Pound Bank-Note” is a wonderful story. Two evil old men make a bet that they will create a million pound note with the approval of the Bank of England, and they find a very talented man who is unemployed. They give him a million pound note. It sounds wonderful until he tries to spend it. But of course he can’t. And he gets himself into a lot of trouble, gets into a lot of debt, and falls in love before the two men can return. It’s great fun from beginning to end.

Undoubtedly, Mark Twain is a genius. His short stories are probably better than his novels, and his jokes are probably even better than his short stories. His wonderful comment about this, “When I was a 14-year-old boy, my father was so ignorant that I couldn’t tolerate that old man around me. But when I turned 21, I was amazed to see how much he learned in seven years” is brilliant.

The second reason for choosing this short story is personal. The premise that the presence of money works exactly the same as money itself is a lesson I had the opportunity to learn the hard way in 1974, when a vice president of the Bank of Boston confidently walked into my life and told a story about a company called Aquablast. I believed him. I didn’t do almost any due diligence. Whatever I had, he understood me. Twain’s short story became my own story, in a way. The only difference is that from the wreck Twain wrote a charming entertainment, and I from my wreck Not a penny more, not a penny less.

bad blood (2018) by John Carreyrou

bad blood Is that the book you give to someone who says to you ‘Surely someone must have seen this?’ Elizabeth Holmes convinces some of the most powerful people in America that she has invented a machine that can perform hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood. He didn’t do that. The machine did not work. And by the time the truth came out, she had raised almost a billion dollars.

The people Holmes defrauded were shrewd financiers with brilliant careers behind them, who nine times out of ten would have spotted an impostor a hundred yards away. He was a stalwart of the American establishment. He still hasn’t seen it. The figures involved, millions raised on a machine that was not working, were, as I said in 1974 when the Aquablast scale impressed me, staggering. Absolutely shocking.

At the height of the deception, Theranos’s board included Henry Kissinger and George Shultz. I met Kissinger once. I found him formal, cautious, clearly brilliant. He made a statement that has stuck with me ever since, and now I think has taken on a special relevance to the Theranos story. ‘If I go to my grave fifty-one percent right, I will be very pleased with myself.’ Of course, Holmes was not fifty-one percent right. She was almost completely wrong. Kissinger’s humility about his decision is a useful corrective, especially when the room is full of confident people.

Carreyrou’s reporting is meticulous and devastating. Read this for the mechanics of the con. Read this for warnings. Most of all, read this, because the scale of trust that a charismatic founder can engender is a pattern that didn’t end with Theranos. And if this sounds at all familiar to a Canadian investment made by a young Member of Parliament in 1974, the fault is not entirely mine.

catch Me If You Can (1980) by Frank Abagnale

This book, the true story of a teen who impersonated a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer and cashed out millions in fraudulent checks before being caught by the FBI, is so outrageous it sounds like fiction.

What fascinates me about Abagnale is his sheer nerve. He had no team. He didn’t have any technology. He had the charm and the confidence and the understanding, which every great con artist has, that people see what they expect to see. If you dress like a pilot and walk like a pilot, no one asks for your license.

I like the idea, although I admit to a cold fear. Very scary, to be a pilot and take me anywhere. Read a book for audacity. Then read the list of jobs for which the FBI hired Abagnale. It’s a surprisingly redemptive end to a con artist’s story, and a reminder that the best con artists and the best detectives often have more in common than either of them would like to admit.

The stage we’ve reached with modern books and modern movies is a stage where the public wants the bad guy to win. It almost becomes ridiculous. catch Me If You Can Is a perfect example. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale, and you want him to win, despite the fact that Tom Hanks, who plays the FBI agent pursuing him, is one of the nicest guys on Earth. This is his problem. He is one of the nicest people on earth. So you want Wicked DiCaprio to win. And that’s actually what makes the film. If you want him to lose, and you don’t like him, it won’t work. You have to go for it.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (1973) by John Goode

John Goode published the novel in 1973 and Joseph Sargent filmed it with Walter Matthau the following year. what i like about pelham 123 The point is that the train is always moving. You feel the tension of activity and action. You realize that Transit Police Lieutenant Zachary Garber – played brilliantly by Walter Matthau in the film – is a good guy, and he’s trying to solve the problem.

What attracted me was how many angles it was written from. You read it from someone on the forum. You read it from someone on the train. But the most fun I had in the film was watching it from headquarters, where the work was being done on different television screens. And while they’re impotent on one level, because they can just press buttons and watch, it doesn’t take away the tension. This added to it. And it’s crossed with the obvious puzzle – how are the hijackers, led by Mr. Blue, supposed to escape when they’re on a public train in a tunnel? This makes for a very exciting ending, where you discover that the bad guy is not as bad as you thought.

Look at the five books I’ve chosen together and you’ll notice something. In four of them you find yourself on the side of the culprit. You want Bond’s opponent to be interesting. You want DiCaprio to get away with it. You want the person who has the million pound note to spend it. You want the bad guys on that train—Mr. Blue and friends—to turn out better than you expected.

When it comes to bad guys, the truth is that the public likes them more than the good guys. He loves reading about them. Everyone wants to follow Harvey Metcalfe, who has robbed those four nice young men of their money. Of course they want to see him get beaten in the end. But that’s what they’re following.

a few years later not a penny more Came out, Pierce Brosnan called me. He said, ‘I want to play Metcalf.’ He did not want to play the role of a hero. He wanted to play the role of a villain. I think it’s often more fun to play villains, to act, than to play nice, sweet, enjoyable, nice human beings.

then there is bad bloodAnd no one wants Elizabeth Holmes to win. It’s the difference between a thief on the page and a thief in the world, and it’s why I’ve never been able to enjoy the genre without remembering 1974. The contradiction between the grandeur of these five books and the ugliness of the reality I encountered is, ultimately, why I wrote Not a penny more, not a penny less. You don’t want style when you’re on the wrong end of a scam. You want justice.

Not a penny more, not a penny lessThe 50th anniversary edition, published by Pan Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press on 27 August 2026.