Bookshops are sensitive registers of cultural mood. There are three reasons they should be so. Booksellers handle a larger range of product than any other high- street retailer. How many lines does a car dealership have on offer? Six? A mobile- phone shop? Fifty? How many foodstuffs can you reach for in a supermarket aisle? A few hundred? A self-respecting bookstore will have thousands of items on display, and half a million backlist titles instantly retrievable.
Second, front-of-store books have a fruit-fly shelf life. No sale and within a fortnight it’s back to the warehouse. Ford Fiestas stick around the showroom much longer. So do cans of tuna. With 120,000 new titles coming out each year, there is always something fresh to tempt the browsing customer.
Third, computerised point-of-sale recording devices mean that nowadays the bookseller’s finger is on the public pulse as never before.
All of which makes changes in the layout of bookshops worth looking at. Several genres have become prominent in recent decades, among them how-to books, teen fiction, new age and erotica. Another popular category is true crime - invariably placed alongside crime fiction. On one side Dr Hannibal Lecter, on the other Dr Harold Shipman.
True crime has been around for some time, but only recently has it acquired the status of a fully fledged genre. The most eminent US crime-writing awards, the Edgars (named after the progenitive Edgar Allen Poe), have had since 1948 given an annual prize for what it calls “fact crime”. (Last year’s winner was The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Heard of it? Neither had I.) Deeper into the past, much of the genre’s “the facts, only the facts, ma’am” style can be found in the True Detective pulp magazines of the 1930s.
The reigning queen of true crime in the US (and a fact-crime winner) is Ann Rule. She ascended to her throne late in life and by a stranger-than-fiction accident. A divorced mother of four in her 40s, Rule found herself answering calls in a crisis-hotline centre, alongside a personable university student called Ted. She and Ted became friends and stayed in touch. Rule had contacts in the police world and had undertaken to write her first book, about a string of unsolved, sadistic murders of pretty young girls in the Seattle area. Their slayer would eventually turn out to be her pal, Ted Bundy. Until his trial, Rule remained in two minds as to whether it could be him. He was finally convicted, and she was finally convinced, by bite marks - his “orthodontic print” - on the buttock of one of his savaged victims.
The book that Rule wrote in 1980 about her relationship with Bundy and his murder spree, The Stranger Beside Me, sold by the million and launched her into a best-selling career. Since 1980 she has published some 20 books and 1,400 articles about the “strangers beside us”.
In Britain the pattern of crime is different from that in the US, and so is its true crime writing. There are two main literary traditions. One goes back to the Newgate Calendar, an 18th-century “Bloody Register” of hanged rogues. Special attention was given in the Calendar to folk heroes such as Dick Turpin and Jack Sheppard - criminals who could be seen as proto-revolutionaries, such as the pseudonymous Captain Swing or King Lud. Authorities are chronically nervous of “bandits” (as Eric Hobsbawm labelled them) who threaten not just property but the social order.
In the early Victorian period there was a moral panic about “Newgate fiction” - novels that glamorised crime, using life-stories lifted from the Calendar. Francis Courvoisier, a valet who slit his master’s throat, claimed (preposterously) that he was inspired to his monstrous act by reading Newgate novels. When Edward Bulwer-Lytton published his 1846 novel Lucretia, based on the story of the poisoner Thomas Wainewright, The Times called it “a disgrace to the writer, a shame to us all”. The Thunderer thundered in vain. Crime fiction/true crime was here to stay.
The entertainment industry has always been willing to cater to a public which, ambivalently, wants its legislators not to spare the criminals, and its authors not to spare it any gory detail. George Orwell, meditating the sad decline in cultural morality since Raffles the Amateur Cracksman, observed that “books have been written about Al Capone that are hardly different in tone from the books written about Henry Ford, Stalin, Lord Northcliffe, and all the rest of the cabin-to-White House brigade”.
That was the 1940s. It’s nice to think of Orwell, now a venerable 102 years old, contemplating the literary career of Mark Brandon Read, alias “Chopper”, the most celebrated Australian criminal since Ned Kelly. Chopper is so-named in honour of his preferred weaponry. Not an entirely successful career criminal, he has spent some 23 years of his life behind bars. Chopper’s memoirs, now many volumes strong, display on their cover his mutilated torso (he has himself been much chopped) and the bold proclamation: “To the human filth I have bashed, belted, iron-barred, axed, shot, stabbed, kneecapped, set on fire, and driven to their graves: I REGRET NOTHING.” Chopper’s books are said to be the most shoplifted items in Australia. And among the most sold, boosted by a 2000 movie.
An updated British Newgate Calendar would feature memoirs of heroic brutes such as Charles Bronson (formerly known as Michael Peterson, the country’s most notoriously violent “lifer”; his nom de guerre is impudently lifted from the film actor); “The Guv’nor” (Lenny McLean, champion bare-knuckle fighter and gangland enforcer); “Mad Frankie” Fraser; and Dave Courtney, the preening Liberace of East End villainy. These authors are all bona-fide, time-serving criminals. There has been a more recent vogue for the memoirs of the newest caste of professional hard-men, nightclub bouncers such as Geoff Thompson, who generally stay out of jail.
These true-crime memoirs are delivered in demotic patter - “flash”, as the Victorians called it -often tidied up by some more literate (and, you hope, deeply ashamed) journalist. The moral theme, as with Chopper, is “no regrets”. A veritable industry has evolved around the Kray clan, which shares with the royal family the sobriquet “The Firm”. The Kray line of true crime has, with all three brothers gone, reached a comic pitch of exploitation. Anyone who so much as ordered a pale ale in the Blind Beggar pub in the 1950s can, it seems, land a lucrative contract with the publisher John Blake, whose imprint is the brand leader in this section of the genre.
Thuggeries merge in the case of Vinnie Jones, a “hard man” on the soccer pitch who plays a Mad Frankie-style enforcer in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels alongside (who else?) The Guv’nor. McLean died of natural causes before he could capitalise on his rather limited acting talents. Jones has gone on to a Hollywood career.
The authorities, as in Victorian times, are nervous of this resurgence of Newgatery. How can a government protest that it is “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, or promote anti-social behaviour orders, with Vinnie and The Guv’nor leering at them from bookstands and billboards? Hence the Tories’ recent proposal to amend, should they come to power, Labour’s Proceeds of Crime Bill to prevent villains profiteering authorially from their misdeeds.
An alternative, and much more interesting, line of true-crime writing was opened by Colin Wilson with his 1962 Encyclopedia of Modern Murder. It remains his most enduringly best-selling work (who now reads, or even remembers The Outsider?) Wilson, drawing on Camus’ L’Etranger and Dostoevsky, conceives murder as a deed of existentialist self-definition. “Modern murder” required no reason, or motive. The archetypal modern murderers were Leopold and Loeb, who, when asked why they killed their kidnap victim, replied, “Because we damn well wanted to.”
Not everyone concurred with Wilson’s starkly nihilistic analysis. In 1965, Ludovic Kennedy published Ten Rillington Place, his study of the mass murderer (as “serial killers” were then known) John Reginald Christie. Kennedy’s analysis, like much British liberal thought, went back to William Godwin, and his belief that “circumstance causes crime”. There must, somewhere in Christie’s background, have been some “trauma” - a cause. Kennedy found it in the jeer of the first 15-year-old girl Christie ever attempted to have sex with: “Reggie no-dick!” Kennedy posited that Christie’s homicidal rampage, and his violation of women’s dead but still warm bodies, was revenge for that phallic taunt.
The two most recent books on Harold Shipman, current holder of the record for serial killing in the UK, find the “traumatic moment” in the 17-year-old boy’s witnessing his mother dying of cancer, her suffering inadequately eased by the attending doctors’ parsimonious administration of morphine. Wensley Clarkson’s book, Evil Beyond Belief, recreates the episode gothically: “Nottingham, England, 21 June 1963. Moonlight bathes the night in hazy shadows. Grey skin on a shapeless, bloated face. Lying flat on her back... staring over the top of her sheet. He looks down at her - he can’t take his eyes off her. He hears her little dry coughs, like the whimperings of a small dog. She desperately wants more morphine to ease the pain. Oh my God. She’s going to die... “
Motherly old ladies thenceforth became Shipman’s victims, and the homicidal administration of opiates his modus operandi. QED.
Both the books (and the spun-off ITV programme, To Kill and Kill Again, shown earlier this month) confidently assert that they have the answer to the question “Why did he do it?” Shipman’s matricidal slaughter was a grotesque kind of grief therapy. Clarkson’s book carries the strapline: “At last. The inside story of how and why Dr Harold Shipman murdered more than 200 people”. The matching strapline on Carole Peters’ book is “Why Shipman killed and killed again”.
But, truth is, the great “Why?” is not satisfactorily answered by these books, any more than Kennedy satisfactorily answered it in reference to Christie. Many men receive slights about their sexual prowess in adolescence. Many men and women, at formative periods of their lives, undergo the agony of watching a beloved parent die. Only a minuscule number go on to become necrophile murderers or psychopathic serial killers.
The reader is left wondering: are these criminals what Rule, Camus and Wilson call them - “strangers”, aliens that ordinary humans such as ourselves will never understand? Or is it a case of mon semblable, mon frere - serial killers, that is to say, are ourselves, but more so, or ourselves with a few unfortunate kinks?
In the largest sense, true-crime books fill a gulf left by newspaper coverage. Quality papers (one can no longer call them broadsheets) clearly feel that extensive treatment of crime is somehow beneath their notice. They report, occasionally “investigate”, but reserve their serious cogitations for politics. The populist papers (one can no longer call them tabloids) sensationalise. True crime, the best of it, thrives in the gap between the two journalistic domains. It is, one can confidently predict, a genre that will grow - if for no other reason than that true crime pays.
Harold Shipman: Mind Set on Murder
by Carole Peters
Carlton Books £16.99, 248 pages
The Stranger Beside Me
by Ann Rule
Time Warner £8.99, 498 pages
Chopper
by Mark Brandon Read
Blake Publishing £6.99, 282 pages
Insanity: My Mad Life
by Charles Bronson
Blake Publishing £7.99, 335 pages
