Bruce The Bookie: Real Life Story Gambling Sport
Australian History Local History Memoir Biography True Crime Criminology Horse Racing Organised Crime
Bruce the Bookie – Real Life Story Gambling Sport is the gripping, fast-paced memoir that true-crime and racing fans have been hunting for since it first slipped out of print. In just 182 tightly-written pages, co-authors Grantley Bernard and Lindsay Gaze take you inside Australia’s wild SP (starting-price) bookmaking era, when huge cash bets were settled in back-lane pubs, the police were always one step behind, and the odds could change with the sound of hoof-beats at Flemington. From the thrill of landing a 50–1 plunge to the terror of being raided and thrown into the infamous Pentridge Prison, Bruce’s story is a front-row seat to a slice of Aussie history that textbooks rarely mention.
What makes this particular paperback so attractive to collectors is its immaculate condition: crisp, unmarked pages, no spine creases, no ex-library stamps, and no previous owner’s scribble—just a clean, square copy ready for the shelf. Because the title never sold in huge numbers, clean first-edition copies are scarce; most survivors come ex-library or well-thumbed at the track. Finding one this well-preserved is genuinely unusual and instantly upgrades any true-crime, horse-racing or Australian-local-history collection.
Beyond rarity, the content itself is pure gold for readers who loved Underbelly, Chopper or Gai Waterhouse’s autobiography. Bruce details how organised crime muscled into the betting ring, how jockeys and trainers were leaned on, and how he survived jail to rebuild his life—insights that criminology students and true-crime buffs quote in essays and podcasts today. Young adults studying sport-and-society courses will find a primary source that breathes life into lectures on gambling reform, while older readers who lived through the SP days will recognise the vanished world of chalkboards, beer-stained ledgers and “double or nothing.”
If you want a page-turning memoir that doubles as local-history reference material, Bruce the Bookie delivers. Add this very-good-condition copy to your cart now—when the next big spring-carnival scandal hits the headlines, demand for this cult classic always spikes and copies disappear overnight.
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