She was Adair's companion for eight years. She was party to his secrets, his boasting and his exploits as a UDA commander. Their affair lasted almost the entire duration of Adair's career in control of the notorious C Company of the UDA. This book tells her story as she attempts to escape the influence of someone as powerful as her former lover.
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About the Author
June Caldwell is a freelance journalist from Dublin but now based in Belfast. Jackie 'Legs' Robinson lives in Belfast.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By film slave
Format:Paperback
I agree with the criticisms above about poor sub-editing - towards the end, the murder of "Martin Taylor (35)" is mentioned twice within a few lines, as if two 35-year-old Martin Taylors of the UVF had met their maker. Bad enough getting murdered once.
For the rest, I think it's actually a very interesting book, unglamorous, unpretentious, and the outside events are important to the central narrative if you've lived in the North. But the writing gets very messy towards the end, the chronology skips around like the conversation were running dry, and it struggles to believe in its own relevance at times, I thought. Which is a pity, because the majority of it is worthwhile.
For the rest, I think it's actually a very interesting book, unglamorous, unpretentious, and the outside events are important to the central narrative if you've lived in the North. But the writing gets very messy towards the end, the chronology skips around like the conversation were running dry, and it struggles to believe in its own relevance at times, I thought. Which is a pity, because the majority of it is worthwhile.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is an interesting enough account of UDA leader Johnny Adair's long-term mistress, which doesn't really open up a lot of detail that we do not already know, but which paints a compelling picture of life inside Adair's "C Company" - a life of casual brutality, drug-taking, abuse and petty hatred. Jackie Robinson, 6 years senior to Adair, was with him for nearly a decade and clearly loved him - including trying to conceive his child during a quasi-conjugal visit when he was inside HMP Maze - but her account comes across as being quite self-pitying and regretful. Very many of the people who populate this book are grotesque - habitually violent, often high on drink and drugs, with little respect for others or indeed for themselves - and it is difficult to empathise with any of them. Overall, however, I wonder whether there's really enough subject matter in this account to make a 199-page book: maybe a 4 - 5 page feature in a magazine would have done better justice to the material. There is a lot of padding in this book - for example, page after page of background material on RUC interrogation techniques in the 1970s, or largely irrelevant descriptions of events which happened during Robinson's lifetime but which had nothing to do with the story of her life with Adair. Also, this book could have done with better sub-editing: it's shoddy but predictable that the (Dublin) publisher often refers to Northern Ireland and the UK as separate entities, when of course NI is part of the UK, and mis-spells the Shankill Road in Belfast as "Shankhill Road" (there's a suburb of Dublin called Shankhill, which explains this lazy sub-editing). I've given the book 2 stars - it would have merited 3 or maybe even 4 if the padding had been removed and the text better sub-edited. Overall, it's a decent enough read, but hardly likely to add much of note to the historical canon of Belfast's sectarian troubles.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Love, war, weird sex, drugs and betrayal - this book reads at times like
the plot of a gangster movie with one crucial difference from the usual
formulaic crime pictures: it's written from a woman's perspective. The prose races along at the rate of a frantic film script where the central character, Johnny Adair's mistress and her co-author June Caldwell, take you on a journey into a very unsavoury underworld. There you encounter hard face terrorist molls; ruthless police interrogators(the worst of them women!); drink and drug dependent killers and the lovers themselves. The real life cast list is far more terrifying than the chief characters in a cockney gangland movie. `Mad Dog' emerges from this brutally honest book more like a crazed pup the way he followed Jackie `Legs' Robinson around like a dog besotted by its owner. Her voice is authentic and revealing. She never holds back even down to the anatomical details of her sex life with the infamous loyalist leader. What is also clear from this ground-breaking account of the life and love of a terrorist mistress is the damage he manages to inflict not just on the wider Northern Ireland community but on the woman herself. It is a credit to both writers that they admit that the experience has left Robinson marred and scarred for life. Perhaps `In Love With A Mad Dog's' greatest achievement however is that it is book on the Northern Ireland conflict written from a completely fresh angle - that of the women who provided shelter, comfort and material support to the men that brought war to the streets of that province. It is a must read if you want to fully understand the social and cultural forces that drove this generation to commit such terrible deeds.
the plot of a gangster movie with one crucial difference from the usual
formulaic crime pictures: it's written from a woman's perspective. The prose races along at the rate of a frantic film script where the central character, Johnny Adair's mistress and her co-author June Caldwell, take you on a journey into a very unsavoury underworld. There you encounter hard face terrorist molls; ruthless police interrogators(the worst of them women!); drink and drug dependent killers and the lovers themselves. The real life cast list is far more terrifying than the chief characters in a cockney gangland movie. `Mad Dog' emerges from this brutally honest book more like a crazed pup the way he followed Jackie `Legs' Robinson around like a dog besotted by its owner. Her voice is authentic and revealing. She never holds back even down to the anatomical details of her sex life with the infamous loyalist leader. What is also clear from this ground-breaking account of the life and love of a terrorist mistress is the damage he manages to inflict not just on the wider Northern Ireland community but on the woman herself. It is a credit to both writers that they admit that the experience has left Robinson marred and scarred for life. Perhaps `In Love With A Mad Dog's' greatest achievement however is that it is book on the Northern Ireland conflict written from a completely fresh angle - that of the women who provided shelter, comfort and material support to the men that brought war to the streets of that province. It is a must read if you want to fully understand the social and cultural forces that drove this generation to commit such terrible deeds.
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