Peter Jm-Wayne

Ever since I began to serve sentences of imprisonment three decades ago I have preferred not to know too much about what I’m missing outside.

Before the fire, before the ash, before theBodies tumbling solitary through space, oneThin skin of glass and metal met another….Two man-made behemoths joined in a       fatal kiss. Although this poetic and deeply philosophical expression of the author’s love (no other word will suffice) for the Empire State Building ostensibly celebrates the 75th anniversary of the great American icon, it has been thrown into more poignant relief, indeed could never have been written at all in its present form, without the sudden and awful twin demise of another icon just a few hundred yards downtown.

Consider this. Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place? Along the magnolia corridors of the most expensive prison ever built in England, in the sombre half-light of a locked-fast double cell, it struck fatally (if metaphorically) once and almost fatally another two times before an oblivious prison service woke up to what was occurring right under their noses — a bizarre sequence of events which they eventually exposed as the premeditated machinations of a serial killer. ‘The Strange Case of Glenn Wright’ (as David Wilson himself entitles this meandering tale of dastardly homicidal intent) constitutes the most sensational section of this trenchant polemic.

A Prison Diary, Volume II: Purgatoryby Jeffrey ArcherPan, £6.99, pp. 310, ISBN 0330426370 A Prison Diary, Volume III: Heavenby Jeffrey ArcherMacmillan, £18.99, pp. 478, ISBN 1405032626 In an extraordinary fax to the Director-General of the Prison Service, Martin Narey, the Home Secretary David Blunkett set down his feelings in an unequivocally forthright manner: I am sick and tired of reading Jeffrey Archer stories about the cushy conditions in which he was placed, the freedom he has been given, the opportunity to do anything he likes, and the snook he is cocking at all of us.