The full facts about debauched lives do not make happy reading, but authors from Robert Louis Stevenson to Hunter S Thompson offer thrilling reading without concealing the cost
My book choices come with two warnings. First, sense: As the old Batman TV shows used to say, don’t try this at home. Not if you want to keep your internal organs intact – and hang on to your friends. Second, sensibility: Some of these books contain what are now unacceptable attitudes to race, while misogyny goes with the territory. Despite the best efforts of cartoon characters such as Tank Girl and some ladies from Viz, it’s generally men who tick the required hellraising boxes: a crazed overindulgence in drink and drugs; an addiction to danger, often involving high-powered vehicles and tall drainpipes; brawling, sprawling and smashing up other people’s property; throwing TV sets into hotel swimming pools and racing motorbikes around hotel corridors; the shabby mistreatment of WAGs and female co-stars, fans and groupies. Hellraising is very much a male pursuit.
Books on hellraisers often focus on “creatives” such as Robert Sellers’ Hollywood Hellraisers: the Life and inebriated times of [actors] Burton, Harris, Reed and O’Toole. Rock stars: Stephen Davies’ Hammer of the Gods, about Led Zeppelin. Writers: John Malcolm Brinnin’s Dylan Thomas in America or Geoffrey Wolff’s Black Sun, about a Lost Generation avatar of Dorian Gray.
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