Join EA Festival on Wednesday, 10 September, at 12pm at The Jockey Club Rooms for an electrifying talk by Jamie Reid, the acclaimed journalist and author of Monsieur X.

Monsieur X, shortlisted for the Daily Telegraph Sports Biography of the Year, is a true story brimming with glamour, riches, violence, and ultimately, tragedy.

Patrice des Moutis was a handsome, charming and well-educated Frenchman with an aristocratic family, a respectable insurance business, and a warm welcome in the smartest Parisian salons. He was also a compulsive gambler and an illegal bookie. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, Des Moutis made a daring attempt to beat the French state-run betting system.

His success so alarmed the authorities that they repeatedly changed the rules of betting in an effort to stop him—and so began a battle of wills. Cheered on by the general public, Des Moutis remained one step ahead of the law until the government finally criminalised his activities, driving him into the arms of the underworld.

This real-life tale of riches, roulette, and rebellion is told with flair and insight by Jamie Reid—winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and one of the UK’s finest chroniclers of the darker edges of racing, gambling, and postwar intrigue.

About Jamie Reid:
Jamie Reid is an author and journalist known for his award-winning narrative non-fiction, often centred on characters who exist in moral grey zones.

A lifelong lover of horse racing and gambling, Reid won the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year for Doped, an exposé of a 1960s horse doping and bookmaking scandal. He followed it with Blown, the remarkable story of John Goldsmith—a racehorse trainer who served as an SOE agent in Occupied France.

His other books include Put Your Life On It, the authorised biography of bookmaker Victor Chandler, and Bandit Country, which recounts Britain’s 1960s gambling boom and the notorious ‘One Armed Bandit Murder’ that inspired the gangster film Get Carter.

Educated at Oxford and Stanford, Reid worked for The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian, and spent ten years writing the Smart Money column for the Financial Times’ How To Spend It. He lives in Bath. In 2023, he wrote a feature for the FT on Prince Khalid Abdullah’s Banstead Manor Stud Farm, home to the legendary racehorse Frankel.

The one-hour talk  will take place at 12 noon, followed by a glass of sparkling wine during the book signing and a two-course set lunch in The Dining Room.  

Tickets are £75 for Talk plus Lunch and £20 for the Talk Only.