Customer Reviews

The Gamblers: John Aspinall, James Goldsmith and the murder of Lord Lucan

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Headlined as an investigation into the lives of three of the UK's most notorious 60's gamblers - James Goldsmith, John Aspinall & "Lucky" Lord Lucan - and claiming to reveal, for the first time, the true story behind Lucan's even more notorious "disappearance" - one of the UK's longest running murder mysteries - "The Gamblers" is a quite riveting insight into a bizarre world of power, glamour, addiction, fabulous wealth and self destruction. Like the friend who recommended it to me I read it virtually straight through and while I left with as many questions as answers I discovered, on the way, a whole host of mind-boggling facts about the people who populated London's most exclusive gambling den, "The Clermont Club", and its now iconic sister night-club, "Annabel's".

Cleverly underpinned by sufficient clearly genuine information to make you believe it all, you are, by the last third of the book, quite prepared to fully accept Pearson's take on Lucan's fate, even though the lines between objective analysis and sensationalist interpretation have in fact become fairly blurred. But no matter because, in the end, "The Gamblers" is much more than simply another title-selling angle on the Lord Lucan saga, rather an intriguing exploration into a part of London's "swinging sixties" scene that most of us never knew existed and a fascinating study of what draws the rich & privileged into the ridiculously high-risk world of big-money gambling.