Mr Nice, by Howard Marks (Minerva, £5.99 in UK)

"He was Britain's most wanted man. He has just spent seven years in America's toughest penitentiary. You'll like him," promises the blurb on the cover of this autobiography of a "good" dope dealer. Well, it's possible to get too much of a good thing, and 466 pages of Mr Marks's life history is an awful lot to wade through without the aid of mind-bending substances, though some of the episodes are, it must be said, pretty mind-bending - running drugs to Ballinskelligs, for instance. The author's wry comments on a world which is rarely subject to articulate analysis are entertaining, though hardly - since he was, nice or not, a real-life drug dealer - as edifying as he imagines.