Cops and Robbers

Product Information

Look at the list of the things that the robbers took on Christmas Eve (found in the illustration showing the Street Map). Find out the approximate value of each item. What is the total value of the items stolen?

Long before Steven Paige and Ed Robertson mused about what they would do if they had a million dollars, Tom and Joe decided it was a game worth playing; a risk worth taking. A high stakes adventure that will keep you guessing and breathless until the very end.' Michael Gerard Bauer, author of Don't Call Me Ishmael The edition I read has this terrible front cover that makes the book out to be a farce rather than a “comic mystery” of its day. Shame that anyone judging a book by its cover would most likely miss this gem. The robbers ‘take? whatever they please’. Why is this wrong? How does it make people feel? What can we do to prevent others taking our things?The London cops are described as being ‘hardworking, brave and true’. Think of other words that describe the qualities of a good police officer. This is a new Puffin edition of Allan Ahlberg's best-selling Cops and Robbers classic picture book, with a brand new cover! The robbers of London town plan a desperate crime one Christmas Eve - to steal all the toys they can lay their hands on! Fortunately, the robbers meet their match in brave office Pugh who leaps into action and arrests the villains - all except Grandma Swagg who manages to get away. Okay I'm going to open with an apology again. This book was recommended by a friend, a friend who obviously liked it, very much. I just could not like it, get into it or enjoy the subject matter. For me...that's for me, it barely escapes a 1 star rating. Sorry.

If your mum was a cop and your dad was a crim who needed your help to commit a crime, would you do it to save him? At what cost? This is one of D. Westlake's "comic caper" reads. There's meant to be a certain amount of humor or lightheartedness. I won't give any spoilers in the open here so all I mention can be found in the synopsis or I'll hide it. So, the aforementioned subject matter...a couple of crooked cops. Yeah I know it's somewhat played for laughs even though the story is told straight. But it still doesn't sit well with me and I really can't identify with our "protagonists" or their point of view.

A new nailbiter from the bestselling author of Two Wolves, The Fall and Detention. "Make sure you start this well before bedtime because you wont want to stop." Morris Gleitzman Joe and Tom cross the line, but I still found myself rooting for them. Perhaps that's wrong, but who among us hasn't occasionally rooted for the rebel and the outlaw. Besides Westlake is very careful. There is very little violence and our two protagonists don't ever hurt anybody. The two victims are a very wealthy brokerage firm which lies about how much is stolen and the Mob. Not actually sympathetic organizations and that's important in stories like this if the reader is to root for the crooks. The cover of the book includes pictures of different ‘cops and robbers’. Can you draw your own picture of what a cop / robber might look like? The book, the story, and the characters are all quite believable for the early 1970s. This wouldn’t (and couldn’t) have worked today. But that’s what’s so great: it’s a point in time when the genius of it all was entirely possible. One of the scripts that he worked on in the early seventies was The New Centurions. I suspect that it might have influenced him in writing this story. That and the fact that by the early seventies the N.Y.P.D. was undergoing the trauma of the Knapp Commission/Frank Serpico and people were starting to look at cops in a different light - both good and bad. This book has a Wambaugh flavor to it. There is humor, but it's sardonic and incidental. The story is a heist caper, but this time it's being pulled of by a couple cops who have had enough of their job and the city and just want to get out. The seventies had begun and even though the decade was only a couple of years old one can already see the beginning of the so-called "Me Generation" beginning to take form.