Chronicles of a Knife-Wielding Gangster

Chronicles of a Knife-Wielding Gangster is a book by Hasan Hedayat, one of the prominent Iranian directors and storytellers. He points out that in the early 1990s, he initially engaged in research on the role of gangsters in Tehran’s social and political transformations as a hobby, which revealed significant realities to him. Hasan Hedayat gradually realized that the relationships among gangsters and their connections with political movements were more deep-rooted than they appeared, and their widespread role in social and political developments cast a shadow over Iran’s historical events from the Constitutional Revolution onward, like an internal mafia. The century-long historical period Hasan Hedayat researched shows that in most of the country’s major social and cultural changes, there is a trace of petty thugs or influential gangsters.
The facts revealed from this research led Hasan Hedayat to approach one of Tehran’s famous and old gangsters named Hashem Absardari. Through multiple meetings with Hashem Absardari, he succeeded in documenting his life story from 1945 to 1960 in the book “Chronicles of a Knife-Wielding Gangster.” The book offers astonishing stories about the life and connections of this social class and is very unique in its writing style and storytelling language.