Crooked compendium

The complete language of crime runs to thousands of words. Ms Lees offers an alluring mixture, the good bits, as it were

Jonathon Green is a lexicographer and author

they say, and Ms Lees, properly Gibson-Lees, seems well-suited to her self-imposed task. Her father was probably a spy (the crime), and in Hong Kong, where Ms Lees spent her youth, her mother was a headmistress (the dictionary). She has been an actress, notably in TV’s where she played a communist résistante, a role that for whatever reason required her to appear