A tale of two well-documented men, this brings together two entwined lives in a new form.

Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks straddles the lines between multiple approaches — biographies of two individuals, a history of a wrestling era, a specific rivalry, and one high-profile event — in a way that has many of the advantages of each without becoming unfocused.

The book brings together material from existing books and news articles, plus original interviews with Bret Hart, Tony St Clair and Mal Sanders among others. It’s weaved together well and uses relevant extracts to tell the story, rather than feeling too much like a “cut-and-shut” operations. There’s also a well balanced level of non-wrestling historical content to put things into context rather than padding, for example noting how Big Daddy’s match with John Quinn escaped an ITV broadcaster strike by a matter of weeks. (Said match is also a good example of the book not getting too caught up in the narrative, correctly identifying it as both the forerunner of, and in some ways bigger than, the Haystacks Wembley match.)

It means there’s not much in the way of new revelations here, but rather a case of putting the pieces together. It tracks the men’s respective careers and then how they were put together as partners and then rivals, charting the way Max Crabtree built the feud up while doing everything possible to hold off the moments when they finally collided and then had the inevitable singles match. It then charts the aftermath of the Wembley match and the arguments that Crabtree spent too long without attempting to replace their act.

The biggest strength of the book is handling the timeline in a way that presents the two men’s stories and connections as a big picture rather than an isolated moment. In particular, it brings clarity to the often confusing story of how the pair transitioned from a villainous tag team to a clear hero vs villain rivalry, with Daddy’s status often unclear and inconsistent in the mid-to-late 70s. The book clearly illustrates how things went down and when on television and around the halls, highlighting how the slow transition of booking power from Mick McManus to Mike Marino and then to Max Crabtree explains the inconsistency.

As with Bell’s previous work on the British Bulldogs and Douglas Clark, the most divisive element of the book is likely to be the narrative style. Bell favours a “narrative non-fiction” approach which often means presenting incidents and dialog which are constructed rather than reported: such sections are always based on (or inferred from) known incidents and opinions, but are not direct first-person or reported happenings.

This time round Bell makes a point of using footnotes to highlight when he has done this and what elements are imagined (along with a “behind the curtain” section at the end of the book which explains the interviewing and writing process.) All quotes are either directly sourced or highlighted as constructed, though one weakness is that it frequently reproduces quotes from Shirley Crabtree taken from Ryan Danes’ Who’s The Daddy without noting that many of those quotes were similarly “constructed” by Danes from private letters and second-hand recollection. The footnotes approach certainly helps avoid misleading readers, though it can sometimes be a little jarring to have a description of an incident and then read a footnote that concedes it may never have happened.

Whether or not this approach bothers a historically-minded reader, it’s certainly not a deal-breaker for the book’s readability. It’s written in a way that has something to offer from those with only a passing interest in the topic to those who lived through the era or have studied it intensely.

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(Disclaimer: The author provided a review copy. I am quoted in the book as a historian source.)