On Iniquity - Pamela Hansford Johnson

 A number of factors drew me to this rarity.   Pamela Hansford Johnson was an early object of Dylan Thomas's desire who ended up marrying Leicester-born novelist, politician and all-round egghead C P Snow.   As Lady Snow PHJ attended the trial of Moors Murderers Brady and Hindley in April 1966.   The following year she worked up her articles into this monograph.

It's an odd book.   Her point is that Brady and Hindley were products of the so-called liberalisation of the Sixties.   Brady became a monster, she argues, because an ineffectual state allowed him access to pornography and pornographic literature (by which she expressly means the works of the Marquis de Sade).  She has a point - but 60 years on we carry much stronger pornography in our phones and devices and reading literature is a habit dying a slow and protracted death.   Yes, there are serial killers with far greater tallies today - in 1967 there was only really Jack the Ripper and a few oddballs in America - but today's monster are mass killers who often also kill themselves and who are motivated by, of all things, puritanical religosity.   The last serial killers for sex in the UK were the Wests, both out of the way before the Millennium.

Another thing PHJ didn't know was the true tally for Brady and Hindley.   Hindley only admitted the murders of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade in the Eighties.   PHJ's sadism theory really relies in the horrific ordeal of poor Lesley Ann Downey, which I still remember hearing about as a ten year-old.   All five murders were ghastly and unforgivable but only Lesley Ann was degraded to that extent.   Could it just be, in fact, that Brady was simply a monster who found himself the perfect ally in Myra Hindley?

On Iniquity is very well written and a fascinating sociological snapshot of its era.

Death of a Murderer - Rupert Thomson

We all know who the murderer is. There's a photo of her on the cover. That photo. It's November 2002 and she's died in prison. Unlucky career constable Billy Tyler draws what is literally the graveyard shift, guarding the body in the hospital morgue, protecting the infamous woman from the press, souvenir hunters, the kind of vulnerable people who get worked up into a lather over crimes committed forty years ago. Billy's wife Sue, who's going through a difficult time, doesn't want him to do it. But Billy's former protege, now his superior, has asked him as a personal favour. And besides, where's the harm? The body's locked away in a drawer; he can't even look on the face.

Inevitably, the the hours round midnight, Billy's mind starts to wander. He comes from the same area as the murderers, he is the same generation as their victims. There are connections, parallels. Billy confronts his past, his life now.

Death of a Murderer is the only Rupert Thomson novel I have read. It won't be the last. The stunning premise, compressing so much emotional resonance into a twelve-hour shift; the central conceit, which I won't reveal here, leaving you to experience the jaw-dropping moment for yourself; and above all the prose - nothing elaborate, nothing overwrought, just simple, steady, everyday language transcribing the experience of life.

Superb and highly recommended.