Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Jackie Turpin

Now in his 80th year, 'Battling' Jack Turpin is the last surviving member of his generation of Britain's best-known and best-loved boxing family. 
 
Jack's father, Lionel Turpin, came from British Guiana to volunteer for the British Army during the Great War. He was wounded on the battlefields of France and invalided to Warwick, the first black man to settle in the area. Lionel married a local girl but his early death left her struggling to raise their three sons and two daughters in pre-Welfare State England. 
 
As young men, the excitement and gladiatorial glamour of the ring lured Jack and his brothers into professional boxing. From a home-made backstreet gymnasium, they punched their way into the record books and into the hearts of the British people. 
 
Battling Jack is a wonderfully narrated account of the life and times of a remarkable man who was once Britain's busiest featherweight. It is also the history of the beginnings of a black presence in British boxing. Turpin offers us a ringside seat at heroic battles and comic encounters. He takes us behind the scenes of a scandal that rocked the sporting world and into his confidence about the mystery that surrounds his younger brother's death. 
 
Jack Turpin has out-stared ignorance and prejudice, tasted triumph and celebrity, and endured hardship and tragedy. Heart-rending, raw, honest and funny, his is a story that had to be told.

Battling Jack Turpin

You Gotta Fight Back

Frank Maloney

Kevin Brennan

From the streets of Peckham to the neon-lit strip of Las Vegas, Frank Maloney's life has been a roller-coaster ride that even he finds hard to believe at times. The Cockney-born son of Irish parents, who once harboured thoughts of becoming a priest, instead went on to manage Lennox Lewis for 12 years and help him become the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.In No Baloney, Frank lifts the lid on the world of big-time boxing and its household names, and gives a remarkable account of his time with Lewis, revealing stories and offering opinions that can only come from a true insider. He also gives an insight into the way money, sex, drugs, politics, bribery and corruption have played their part in the sport. But Maloney's story is not just about boxing. It is also about one of life's characters, whose colourful story is told with a brand of humour and emotion that makes it compelling reading. Before settling on a career in boxing, he tried his hand at being a jockey, street trader, chef, pub landlord, cab driver and greengrocer. Along the way there have been girls, fights, a murder investigation and a broken marriage, but through it all there has also been a determination to succeed against the odds. Once dubbed a 'Mental Midget' and 'Pugilistic Pygmy' by Don King, Frank Maloney has gone on to have the last laugh over the flamboyant American promoter and over those who believed he would fail. For, above all, No Baloney is the story of a man who has been lucky enough to experience the kind of life he could not have imagined in his wildest dreams all those years ago in south-east London - and Maloney has made sure he's lived it to the full.

No Baloney

A Journey From Peckham To Las Vegas

Patrick Myler

More than the world heavyweight championship was at stake when Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling on 22 June 1938. In a world on the brink of war, the contest was projected as a test of nationalistic, racial and political ideals. It was black man against white man, a showdown between democracy and totalitarianism. 
 
No single event in the history of boxing generated as much excitement or such extremes of emotions. It was the night Louis hit a peak of fistic perfection, hardly missing a punch as he destroyed the challenger inside three brutal minutes. 
 
Following the Second World War, the two boxers' lives took contrasting turns. Louis was hounded over unpaid taxes and drifted into a hazy world of drugs, paranoia and ill health, eventually dying in 1981. Schmeling, meanwhile, became a successful businessman and remained active until his death in 2005. 
 
Ring of Hate is a gripping story of two men drawn together by their chosen profession and divided by the cruel demands of warring nations.

Ring of Hate: The Brown Bomber and Hitler's Hero

Joe Louis v. Max Schmeling and the Bitter Propaganda War

Jimmy Stockin

Martin King

Martin Knight

Everyone is familiar with the gypsy race but few outside their close-knit and ancient community really know what being a gypsy is about -how they live and how they think. This is the story of a gypsy man, Jimmy Stockin, born into a world where fighting is first nature. Whilst football maybe the chosen sport for most British males, bare-knuckle fighting is a passion among gypsies both as participants and spectators. Jimmy was born into fighting family. His father and grand-father before him 'trod the cobbles' and young Jimmy was being put up against other boys on gypsy camps from the age of five. He took on bare knuckle challenges from wherever they came. Before long Jimmy was widely recognised as the champion of the bare-knuckle fighters. On the Cobbles is a rare insight into a community under threat - a community that treasures tradition - and a man who had little choice in becoming a fighter but was nevertheless determined to be the best. Shocking and sad, humourous and brutal, this story opens the door to a different world. The world of a gypsy warrior.

On The Cobbles

Jimmy Stockin: The Life Of A Bare Knuckled Gypsy Warrior

Derick Allsop

Few sports polarise public opinion as boxing does. Some contend that it is repugnant and barbaric, for others a legitimate, regulated contest of skill, strength and willpower. What cannot be denied is that the fight game has produced some of sport's greatest icons. Many more are content to make a decent living or at least supplement their income by stepping into the ring. 
 
Fighting Chance gets up close with those involved in everyday British boxing. It goes behind the scenes at shows and into gyms to meet champions such as Ricky Hatton, starry-eyed young men dreaming of world titles, hard-nosed pros surviving another pay day and veteran trainers who have seen it all and sometimes wish they hadn't. Many of them say this brutal trade has saved them from a life of crime and drugs, and given them an opportunity to find self-esteem. All recognise the possible cost - Paul Ingles, for example, almost lost his life in the ring - but maintain it is a risk worth taking. 
 
Martin Jolley attempted suicide in his darkest hour but survived and sought a kind of refuge as a journeyman boxer, taking fights at short notice and then returning to his day job as a printer. Michael Jennings' brother was killed by an addiction to drugs and he is convinced the sport has spared him the same tragic fate. Others, however, are always tormented by their demons. Michael Gomez, once held on a murder charge, was hailed as a future world champion until he went off the rails, plunging his private life into turmoil and leaving his career on the brink. Brian Hughes, one of the best-known and most successful trainers in the country, admits his love of boxing has been eroded by the 'stinking' side of the business. 
 
Often shocking, sometimes humorous, always gripping, Fighting Chance is an odyssey through a world few will have encountered. It gives a candid insight and many of its compelling characters.

Fighting Chance

Winners and Losers in the Ultimate Risk Business

Bernard O'Mahoney

From Salford to St Louis, former professional boxer Wayne Barker fought every man who ever challenged him. In this brutally honest account of his eventful life, Wayne recounts how his parents left him in the care of the travelling community, where he learned to fight and journeyed throughout Britain and Ireland to take on opponents for cash. 
 
After being charged with attempting to murder a child killer, Wayne fled to America, where he found work in the gymnasiums of New York sparring with the likes of world champion Wilfred Benítez. His ability in the ring was noticed by promoter Bobby Gleason, whose gym had been graced by legendary boxers such as Jake LaMotta. Gleason set up a fight in Caracas between Wayne and former super middleweight world champion Fulgencio Obelmejias ('Fully Obel'). 
 
Wayne’s past eventually caught up with him and he was deported to Britain, where he served time in prison. He returned to the streets to earn a living from bare-knuckle fighting, before becoming a trainer and running a gym. Cancer claimed his life in 2012.

Wayne Barker: Born to Fight

The Extraordinary Story of a Bare-Knuckle Boxer

John Burrowes

'Before Benny, nobody from the Gorbals became World Champion of anything...' 
 
Benny Lynch was Scotland's first World Boxing Champion and the most talked-about British sportsman of his generation. In fact, many consider him to be the finest fighter the country has ever produced. 
 
Benny is the amazing account of how Lynch battled his way above and beyond the 'fifty-shilling men' of his home town of Glasgow to become the champion of Scotland, Britain, Europe and the world, earning a reputation as one of the greatest pugilists of all time. But this absorbing biography also details how his career sadly came to a premature halt because of Lynch's alcoholism, which destroyed his health and led to him being abandoned by his countless followers. It took his tragic death at the age of only 33 to restore the fallen idol to legendary status again. 
 
The gritty reality of the daily grind of life in the Depression-era Gorbals is captured vividly in this remarkable story of the rise and tragic fall of a fighting legend.

Benny

The Life And Times Of A Fighting Legend

Bob Mee

Sport can offer catharsis in times of crisis, but not this time. Liston was a mob fighter with a criminal past, and rumours were spreading that Clay was not just a noisy, bright-eyed boy blessed with more than his share of the craziness of youth, but a believer in a shadowy cult: the Nation of Islam. Instead of a hero and a villain, boxing had served up two bad guys. 
 
Against this backdrop of political instability, of a country at war with itself, in a time when ordinary African American people were still being maimed and killed for the smallest acts of defiance, Liston and Clay sought out their own individual destinies. 
 
Liston and Ali follows the contrasting paths these two men took, from their backgrounds in Arkansas and Kentucky through to that sixteen-month period in 1964 and 1965 when the story of the world heavyweight championship centred on them and all they stood for. Using original source material, it explores a riveting chapter in sporting history with fresh insight and in rare detail.

Liston and Ali

The Ugly Bear and the Boy Who Would Be King

Thomas Myler

In Boxing's Hall of Shame, Thomas Myler tells the inside stories of the real fight game. He reveals the sport's heroes and villains, mobsters and fixers, its shame and sorrows, providing the reader with a ringside seat at boxing's greatest and most controversial contests along the way. 
 
This no-holds-barred volume includes the enraged Mike Tyson taking a chunk out of Evander Holyfield's ear; Roberto Duran's baffling retirement against Sugar Ray Leonard; the Riddick Bowe-Andrew Golota fiasco that ended in an ugly full-scale riot; Sonny Liston - whose mobster background was not unknown to boxing authorities - going down under Muhammad Ali's phantom punch; and Jake LaMotta's botched dive against Billy Fox, which turned the 'Raging Bull' into boxing's bad boy overnight. 
 
Boxing's Hall of Shame sensationally revisits the boxing scandals, the fixed fights and the powerful influence of the underworld, taking the reader behind the scenes of the glove sport to reveal the shady underbelly of boxing through the ages.

Boxing's Hall of Shame

The Fight Game's Darkest Days

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