Mumbai, photo by Ben Garrison , via Flickr To kick off our new #FridayReads segment and tie in to August’s The Heat is On theme, I thought I would introduce our Blood-Red Pencil readers to a fellow Australian – Gregory Smith, aka Gregory David Roberts , aka “The Gentleman Bandit”, aka Shantaram. Roberts’ real-life story is crazy enough - he robbed banks, politely, with a toy pistol while wearing a three-piece suit, was caught, convicted, and sentenced to 23 years in prison, broke out of jail MacGyver-style in broad daylight, fled the country with police hot on his tail , and ended up living in a slum in Mumbai, India. Shantaram is Roberts’ heavily-fictionalized account of the decade when he seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. Arriving just as a devastating fire rips through a Mumbai slum, Marty-Stu the protagonist, driven by a Messiah-complex desire to atone for his crimes, opens a make-shift medical clinic (with just a first-aid course under his belt), infil...