The best outlaw biker books

As a young kid suddenly fascinated by bikes, reading this for the first time was a truly formative experience for me and Hunter S Thompson’s 1966 classic has to be the starting point for anyone wanting to read about outlaw bikers. If you’re at all interested in reading about outlaw bikers you will have read this already, and if you haven’t, well don’t do anything else until you have.

From the father of ‘gonzo journalism’ this is the story of Thompson’s close association with the 1960’s Californian Hell's Angels which helped spread their reputation worldwide. A truly wild ride that has had a life-changing effect on me for one.

I found this telling of the Shedden massacre of eight Bandidos at the hands of a mix of club mates and deranged wannabes, including a one-time failed police officer who was looking to reinvent himself as an outlaw biker player, very affecting, reading as it does like an almost Shakespearian real-life tragedy.

Edwards, along with Jerry Langton one of the key chroniclers of the Canadian outlaw biker scene, tells the stories of the dead men, introducing a group ranging from established bikers to probationers, loners to family men, and petty criminals to ordinary working stiffs; laying out how they all came to be facing their death one after another in a Nazi fantasist’s barn.

One of my reasons for starting to write about the UK outlaw biker scene in particular was that no one else seemed to be treating it seriously. That all changed when Tony Thompson, a highly respected journalist with a track record of highly readable and successful books on the UK gangland and crime scene produced this.

This book is the biography of ex-Outlaws MC member Daniel "Snake Dog" Boone, but through it, Thompson tells the wider story of the development of the UK outlaw biker scene since the eighties and how it has been affected by international biker politics, up to and including the 2007 murder of Gerry Tobin. Thoroughly recommended and essential reading for anyone interested in the club scene in England. I’ve said that if this had come out before my first biker book, the chances are I’d have never finished writing it.

When I’m reading about the biker scene what I’m looking for is the reality that underlies the public image and stereotypes. Jerry Langton doesn’t come across as a big fan of bikers but he’s well connected enough to speak to senior players and he’s a professional writer, so what he has to say is very readable, and to me, informative.

Through telling the extraordinary story of five foot four Walter "Nurget" Stadnick’s rise to criminally visionary national president of the Hell's Angels this book provides one of the best overviews of the development of the outlaw biker world in Canada, the Canadian biker wars, and the involvement of biker clubs in Canada in organised crime (although as a niggle it’s crying out for a map).

The books I’m recommending have all been key sources of insight in differing ways into the realities of the club worlds and cultures. This is a definite recommendation as one of the best “informed outsider’s” overviews I found.

It’s something of a rarity in the outlaw book world being a book by what seems to be a very well-informed and connected outsider (although I understand there has also been criticism of the content) which strives and manages to present a view that seems both balanced and nuanced. I like it because it doesn’t whitewash, nor does it condemn, instead it tries to show and explain.

Australia has a strong bikie culture that draws on a long tradition of ‘mateship’ and this book gives a glimpse behind the scenes of the rules and rituals of club membership, as well as the history of clubs in Australia.