Why does the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin have such an extraordinary reputation today? How come his criminal career has inspired a profusion of often misleading literature and film? This eighteenth-century villain is often portrayed as a hero – dashing, sinister, romantic, daring, a Robin Hood of his times. The reality, as Jonathan Oates reveals in this perceptive, carefully researched study, was radically different. He was a robber, torturer and killer, a gangster whose posthumous reputation has eclipsed the truth about his life. In the early 1700s Turpin progressed from butcher’s apprentice and poacher to become a member of the Gregory gang which terrorized householders around London by robbery and violence. Then came his two-year career as a highwayman robbing travelers, his partnership with Matthew King whom he may have killed in Whitechapel, his murder Thomas Morris in Epping Forest, and his eventual capture and execution. Jonathan Oates recounts the episodes in Turpin’s short, brutal life in dramatic detail, basing his narrative on contemporary sources – trial records and newspapers in particular – and he traces the development of the Turpin legend over 250 years through novels, ballads, plays, television and film. The Dick Turpin who emerges from this rigorous and scholarly biography is in many ways a more interesting man than the legend suggests.

Turned to Account is a study that focuses on the popular genre of criminal biography, examining how it played upon and reflected English society's fears and interest in aberrant behaviour. Faller examines ways in which ordinary Englishmen read, wrote and presumably thought on the subject of criminal actions and character.

The true story of the highwaymen has never been written, nor can it be. The chroniclers were slavishly faithful to their authorities—flatteringly so, in fact; for these authorities consisted of a lot of chapbooks, broadsheets, penny dreadfuls and twopenny bloods, “dying confessions” that had come in for a good deal of posthumous editing, and the contemporary gutter Press—which was even more unreliable then than it is today. Many of these ‘authorities’ were so contradictory that the truth-at-all-costs chroniclers left out some of the best bits of highway lore in their vain attempts to keep faithful to their ridiculous principles. Our own ambition is more modest. We have not sought the El Dorado of absolute truth. We have gone back to the same sources that the chroniclers used—and we have taken pains to ignore the latter gentlemen whenever contemporary reports are still extant. We have not moralized, like the chroniclers, nor have we embellished, like the novelists. We have added nothing—but we have taken away a good deal. We have tried to use our discretion in selection, and our judgment in discrimination between contradictory versions of the same events. Since it was impossible to be faithful to the letter, we have tried to recapture the spirit of the Age of Highwaymen.