The death of the gangster Dave Courtney – found in his bed with a gunshot wound at the age of 64 – has once more brought to the fore the odd fascination with ‘gangsters’ which certain strange sorts harbour. Call me dirty-minded, but as with the ever-growing fascination with ‘true crime’, I can’t help thinking it’s all about sex.

Before we were modern, mean men with brawn rather than brain would have been the best ones to bag; now that bookish Musks and Zuckerbergs rule the world, the Neanderthal has found himself somewhat surplus to requirements. But he still rings a primeval bell with the dimmer members of society, who were never going to be leaving their brains to science anyway. Though money may appear to be the most appealing thing about dating a bank robber, there’s always the feeling that he’s going to be better in bed than a bank clerk. DH Lawrence, bless him, believed that the proletariat had better sex than the bourgeoise and the posh; I can only assume he never got a ghostly glance at the nocturnal side of my first marriage.

Courtney himself was probably the real thing

Those women who write love letters to serial killers are obviously taking it to extremes and rightly reviled as freaks, but the fascination with the ‘hard man’ (note the double entendre) persists right into the highfalutin’ realms of art. Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino have built careers on them; some of Morrissey’s best songs are about them. The girls of The Only Way Is Essex invariably parrot that ‘I like a Bad Boy, me’ as though it’s as ‘cheeky’ as getting a spray-tan in one’s lunch hour. But the reality is somewhat different and involves risking your endorsement deals when your baby-daddy throws acid in peoples’ faces in a nightclub.

Are these nasty young men really gangsters, as we understood the Krays to be – psychos who built empires of fear and make fortunes from ‘protection’ rackets – or are they ‘plastic gangsters’ who have seen too many Vinnie Jones films and which the Urban Dictionary defines thus:

‘A wannabe gangster. The sort of things that a Plastic gangster might get up to are; 1. Telling other people to do things. 2. Getting other people to fight for them. 3. Generally doing everything that real gangsters would do, but with less conviction and intent. And then, when they get in real situations, they always wuss out of the whole thing. Like if they could smash up a fence, they’d be like, nope, sorry. Gotta go home for a bath. or…something.’

Courtney himself was probably the real thing. The child of decent working-class people – ‘I wish I could blame coming from a deprived background — too much concrete, not enough love — but I can’t’ – he started out shoplifting from Woolworths where his mother was a store detective. At 13, he robbed a toy warehouse; he graduated to burglary.

He worshipped the Kray twins – ‘’They were treated like royalty…losing someone like Ronnie is like losing a monarch’ – and stood guard over the gay gangster’s body before comparing his funeral to Churchill’s. He went on to become a ‘debt collector’ and bouncer before establishing an agency which supplied ‘doormen’ to pubs and clubs. He made a fortune and bought a schoolhouse which he remodelled as ‘Camelot Castle’ and over which flew the flag of Saint George.

The conservatism of the gangster is striking. Though they are outsiders, they are never rebels; they invariably believe that society has gone ‘soft’ and that they, in some weird ways, are striking a blow for decency – even when, as Courtney did, they are attacking innocent Chinese waiters with machetes.

‘They only ever hurt their own’ is the usual mindless justification for the way they terrorised ordinary working-class people such as shopkeepers; the implication is that in some strange way they kept the peace, but it’s always a mistake to make the law of the jungle appear benign. In the current repulsive epidemic of the abuse of shop workers by thieving parasites too lazy to get a job, we see an echo of the protection rackets.

It’s understandable that TV Tarquins who’ve never had to live among these thugs would romanticise them – like Alan Partridge getting excited by the idea of tough men in balaclavas. But in common with many people of working-class origin, I favour capital punishment. I grew up with the smiling faces of the legions of lost little girls, murdered by some scumbag for kicks, branded on my brain; I hated those posh women from the Howard League for Penal Reform or similar outfits who were forever on television explaining why some rapist or murderer deserved the freedom to have sex in jail, the right to vote, and get out of prison. When I grew up and went to That London and started working in the shockingly middle-class media, I wondered why people who considered themselves on the side of the weak and the poor – card-carrying members of the brotherhood of man – repeatedly took the part of the mugger, the molester and even the murderer.

Now we live in a society where rape has effectively been ‘decriminalised’ according to Dame Vera Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner and where it has just been announced that thousands of prisoners serving short sentences will be released early due to jail overcrowding. But as the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, Nicole Jacobs, told the Guardian: ‘Many of those serving short sentences will be in prison for domestic abuse and stalking offences. The Ministry of Justice must seriously consider the safety of victims of domestic abuse and set out clearly how they will be protected.’ Yet women are still lapping up True Crime in their droves – and Dave Courtney never went short of female company.

At the risk of sounding like Horrified of Hove, I’m going to stick my neck out and state that the fetishisation of and fascination with violent crime is a sign of something very wrong with someone – whether they’re a commuter reading about ‘Diamond Dave’ and thinking what fun he must have had, or a hipster whose default date-night setting is Netflix-and-kill.