George Tombs has made covering Conrad Black a significant part of his career. He has already written a book about the disgraced newspaper magnate entitled Shades of Black, which was published by a small firm that promptly went out of business.

Both that book and Tombs’s new book, the rather unambiguously titled Robber Baron, benefit immensely from the author’s ability to score interviews with Black himself. The best parts of Robber Baron are those interviews, one at the beginning of the book and one at the end. The first takes place in Black’s Toronto home, which is described in great detail. “There were a few million dollars’ worth of Canadian paintings on the wall, cluttered like postage stamps,” he writes. The second interview is conducted in a Toronto hotel bar. Tombs concludes that interview with a bizarre anecdote about how impressed the waitress was that he knew Black.

The contrast in the usefulness of those two observations is indicative of the uneven quality of Robber Baron. While Tombs is able to use information from some of Black’s oldest acquaintances – like CBC journalist Brian Stewart – to great effect, he also wastes time interviewing John Kenneth Galbraith on Black’s biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which seems like a secondary concern.

Tombs is notably ambivalent about Black’s fate. He seems fairly convinced that Black’s actions were criminal, but he comes across as strangely concerned about what prison life might be like for Black. At one point, Tombs describes another person convicted in Judge Amy St. Eve’s court: “A big burly man with cornrow hair and an orange jumpsuit dragged his chained feet,” he writes. “I wondered whether this was the kind of man Black would share a cell with….”

There are also some tidbits in Robber Baron that might warrant further examination. For example, during his college days, Black chose Laurier LaPierre to be his thesis adviser even though Black had written that LaPierre, who had previously taught him at Upper Canada College, was one of the teachers most likely to engage in corporal punishment. That seems like it could be a nice starting point for a psychoanalyst looking to get on the crowded Black bio bandwagon.