Handsome Brute - Sean O'Connor

Probably the best researched book on sex killer Neville Heath, the 'handsome brute' of the title. Heath was brutish only in the way he treated the women he picked up in the transient world of London hotels in the immediate postwar period. He whipped them and he murdered two. But he was obviously debonair and charming - these women weren't idiots - and his wife in South Africa never accused him of violence. They divorced because he had married under a false name and was a convicted minor criminal.

O'Connor takes a critical view of his subject but doesn't really go into his mental state, issues raised at his trial, appeal, and in the Press. How deluded was he, if at all? That is and always was the question. He had a traumatic childhood with the death of a younger brother. He clearly had talent as a pilot and was undoubtedly brave in action. Because of his dishonesty he was court-martialed three times, yet did well in both the RAF and its South African equivalent. He was determined to serve. Was this heroism or a death wish? How do we differentiate between the two?

A book, therefore, that tells the tale thoroughly but leaves questions unanswered, which is not always a bad thing. Well worth looking out for.

(Great cover image BTW.)

Jack and the Thames Torso Murders - Drew Gray and Andrew Wise

A new Ripper, the subtitle asks? A new suspect, certainly, and a lot of impressive investigation of themes rarely tackled before (the use of rail, trams and buses; the possibility that the killer worked for a firm that had cornered the market in horse butchery and had depots all over London) but for me the fundamental premise - that 'Jack' was responsible for both series of murders in London in 1888 - falls flat. It was the one thing that police and experts agreed on at the time: whoever dumped the torsos was not the same person who slashed up women on the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. It strikes me, moreover, that their motives were different. For example, the torso killer was not greatly interested in the reproductive system of his victims whereas Jack seems to have been interested in nothing else.

Overall, though, this is a highly commendable addition to the field of Ripperology with a refreshing academic sub-structure. The new suspect is credible for one or the other series (more likely the torso murders), certainly lived locally and died at the right time. The last chapter alone, surveying the growth of the Ripper industry, is worth the price. The annoying thing for me is the selectivity of the sources surveyed. The old Ripper hands who co-operated with them are beyond reproach, many other significant contributors are ignored entirely. Leonard Matters, the first in the field, is dismissed because of 'errors' that are never specified. For me, too much credibility is given to geographic and psychological profiling, techniques which have rather fallen from favour since their heyday in the late 20th century. That said, any theorist really has to opt for a local or an incomer. Gray and Wise, go with the majority nowadays, and go for a local. Once you've done that, geographical profiling is always going to be a strand of your thesis.

There is, ultimately, a lot here that is new. New means of getting from A to B in and around the murder ground are brought to light. Convincing arguments are made in favour of including more victims in both series and I for one won't be satisfied until I have followed these up myself.

If you're interested in the Ripper, you have to read this.

A Casebook of Murder - Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson's reputation seems to have faded slightly since his death in 2013. In life he always seemed to be putting out a new book or giving his take on some arcane subject in the press or on TV. Once, of course, he was very famous indeed, not only an original angry young man but one whose debut book The Outsider sought to create a new philosophy for the era of angst. Now, though, he is very much out of fashion. His vast works on the occult are passé, whereas back in the Seventies they held pride of place on any reputable bookshelf. The same goes - with knobs on - for his many volumes on murderers, of which this (from 1969) was an early example.

The problem here is not the concept, though Wilson's preoccupation with sex sits less comfortably now than it did back in the day/ It is the fact that hundreds of lesser lights have attempted similar compilations and lowered the tone. They cobble together cheap cash-ins, whereas Wilson is absolutely serious in intent. That may be another problem. He does tend to make declamatory assumptions which are easily refuted. I tend to think he can forgiven the odd gaff, given that he was ploughing such a lone furrow.

The overarching idea here is that different eras get different kinds of killer. He starts with the late medieval period, then the time of Sheppard and Wild. The 19th century, in which the western world passed from rural villages to sprawling industrial cities and, finally, to the dawn of scientific criminology, warrants four chapters. We end, of course, with two-thirds of the 20th century. When Wilson signed off his book the Moors Murderers were beginning their life sentences and Mary Bell, the Newcastle child killer of children (whom I had remembered as Glaswegian for some reason) was still on trial.

There are many fascinating ideas here but too much is recycled from Wilson's earlier Encyclopedia of Murder (1961 - co-written with Patricia Pitman) or cobbled together from inherently unreliable newspaper reports. Wilson would go on to recycle lots of it many more times over his remaining forty years. That said, there is one reason for Wilson always standing at the head of his field. His Ritual in the Dark (1960) is the best novel ever written about a serial killer and by a distance the most terrifying.

Jack the Ripper - Daniel Farson

Farson's 1972 book introduced the barrister Montague Druitt as Number One Suspect. Actually - as is so often the case with this fascinating work - he put the name to the suspect that Leonard Matters had known about and dismissed in the first ever Ripper book (1928). Farson claimed to have seen the famous Macnaghten Memorandum, a note written by the man who took over as head of the Met immediately after the murders ceased. Farson would have us believe that Macnaghten wrote in his official capacity, a summary document to close the file. Actually what Macnaghten did (and Matters proves beyond reasonable doubt) is copy out Major Arthur Griffiths' suspect list from his 1898 Mysteries of Police and Crime (Part 1). Griffiths had overseen prisons but had never served with the police. He did, however, have extensive police contacts and it may well have been that both Griffiths and Macnaghten got their information from the same source. Was that source authoritative? Probably not, given the insistence that police inquiries wound down after Druitt's body was fished from the Thames on December 31 1888, when in fact key frontline investigators believed the Ripper continued killing. Inspector Reid turned up at various prostitute murders well into 1889 and 1890, and Inspector Abberline was apparently convinced that George Chapman (caught and hanged 1903) was the Ripper.


Farson's book is frankly nowhere near as good as Matters' original. Farson never gives us sources we can check whereas Matters always does. Again, the fact is, Matters shows us, almost half a century earlier, how weak Farson's theory really is. Farson's suspect is a reasonable candidate, whereas Matters' nominee is well nigh ridiculous; on the other hand, Matters' research is thorough and documented whereas Farson in the end resorts to absurd assertions. Farson also claimed (I haven't yet checked if the claim is true) that he is the first to produce a photograph of Druitt. He then goes on to shoot himself in the foot. Is that a glint of madness in the eye, he asks. Answer: no it isn't. Is that an incipient moustache? Absolutely not.


Actually, Farson's research, such as it is, was done for a pair of TV documentaries aired over a decade before the book came out (Farson was an early star of ITV). While the programmes were still be edited, the research dossier mysteriously disappeared, which raises rather obvious suspicions. Nevertheless the book was a big success (as the TV version had been) and really ushered in the great wave of Ripperology that persists to this day. It is essential and enjoyable reading. Farson has an engaging style - but I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him.

Midnight in Peking - Paul French

I can't fathom why I hadn't heard of this book before stumbling upon it in my local library. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was a big hit for John Berendt twenty years ago - they even went on to make a crappy movie - and this book has obvious similarities (real-life murder, cultural bubble, kinky sex and the word midnight in the title). I won't say French's book is better but it is definitely just as good.


It will come as no surprise that the setting here is Peking. The year is (just) 1937. Russian Christmas, January 7. The bubble is the expat community in what was, temporarily, China's second city. Chiang Kai Shek is losing his grip on power and the Japanese are about to invade. A young woman is found butchered in the shadow of the historic Fox Tower. She is Pamela Werner, adopted daughter of E T C Werner, former British consul and leading Sinologist, a man who has devoted his life to understanding Chinese culture.


Unfortunately for Werner, he has fallen from favour with the British Legation, which refuses to permit the Chinese police to investigate in their jurisdiction. A British inspector, Richard Dennis, ex-Scotland Yard, is seconded from another district to assist Inspector Han, but is expressly forbidden to have contact with Werner.


The British, it turns out, have secrets to hide. Pamela, a girl with problems, was still a pupil at Tientsin Grammar School, boarding with headmaster Sydney Yeates who has very recently been sent home because parents, including Werner, complained about his enthusiasm for thrashing. In Peking Pamela likes to be seen as the sophisticated young woman she ought to be - she is twenty years old, after all. She has admirers. On January 7 she goes ice skating with her girlfriends, and disappears on her way home.


The assumption is that it is a very un-Chinese murder. The killer must either be living in one of the many foreign legations or in the Badlands, a red-light district frequented by overseas riff-raff, decandent playboys and hordes of White Russian emigres fallen on hard times.


It is the Badlands, inevitably, which grab our attention. The most useful contact made by any investigator is Shura, a White Russian of indeterminate gender, who alternates as call girl and raffish pimp. One of his sidelines is providing naked girl dance groups for parties in the apartment of a seedy American dentist who also runs a nudist colony in the hills above Peking.


The hero of the book is definitely E T C Warner himself, a dry as dust scholar in his early seventies, who nobody likes. It is French's great achievement that we come to love the old man who doggedly refuses to let the authorities close the file on his dead daughter. When the official investigation runs out of steam, Werner hires his own investigators. When the Japanese come, he presses on alone. Later he is interned in a horrific prison camp. Still he persists. He survives the war - and still he goes on, not resting until he finally expires at the grand age of eighty-nine.


It is Werner's account that forms the basis of French's book but it is the demented cultural hotchpotch of prewar Peking that brings the story alive, and that is all down to French, his massive research and his storytelling flair.


Highly recommended.