Michael Peterson, a well-born, violent, English nineteen-year-old in search of fame, decides to hold up a post office with a rifle. He is arrested after getting away with a very meager haul and is sentenced to seven years in prison. But his thirst for fame doesn’t die down in prison and he never misses an opportunity to get his name in the papers through attacks, assaults and kidnapping. He ends up spending the next thirty-four years in prison, thirty of them in isolation.