Death of a Murderer [Hardcover]

 

 

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Seldom does one read a novel as memorable as this. The prose is pristine, beautiful in its spareness, and the protagonist is incredibly affecting. Billy is, if you will, everyman. An ordinary fellow who through a device employed by the author looks back upon his life, his hopes, regrets, fears and, of course, loves.

Billy Tyler is a policeman, an ordinary one without aspirations for promotion. He's married to Sue, a woman he seems to understand less now than he did when they wed ten years ago. "....here they were, bound together by little more than arguments and tears, by vicious words, by things they didn't even mean." Their only child, Emma, has Down's Syndrome.

One evening a phone call comes - Billy has been assigned to guard the body of one of the most notorious murderers in England until the body is cremated. Her name is Myra Hindley and she has committed the most ghastly killings, even children were tortured before death. Billy is sent to the morgue to make sure nothing happens to the body, that no thrill seekers want a souvenir, a lock of hair, a remnant of clothing. It's not a pleasant assignment - the graveyard shift and he'll be alone.

Sue begged him not to go, to call in sick because he shouldn't be around such evil. He replied that it was his job and so he went to the mortuary, taking his paper work with him, intending to catch up. Instead he remembered. It is through these reminiscences that we learn about Billy's youth, his courtship of Sue, and the difficulties in raising and keeping safe a child with Down's. He emerges as thoroughly likable, one with whom we can empathize, and one for whom we come to care. The aspirations of his younger years have vanished. As he comments, "Life could surge away from you at great speed, leaving you bobbing dumbly in its wake."

The appearances of Myra are not spectral or frightening to him. It is almost as if her were viewing her with detachment. Yet, as he listens to her he realizes that everyone has been harmed by her heinous acts. "We were all damaged by what happened, he thought. We were all changed."

Has that not happened to some of us?

To say that Rupert Thomson is a major talent is an understatement. His writing is electric, concise, and true. This is an amazing story brilliantly written.

- Gail Cooke

Although she's never mentioned by name, the protagonist in this book is the legendary Myra Hindley. Hindley was considered to be an England's most notorious serial killers, and together with her partner Ian Brady was involved in the "Moors murders." For many years the tabloid press depicted Hindley as "the most hated woman in Britain," and the crimes committed by her and Brady undeniably shocked the nation, becoming the benchmark by which other acts of evil came to be measured.

Death of a Murderer takes place on the eve of Hindley's funeral at Cambridge on the 20th November 2002 just as Billy Tyler, a thirty-something police constable from Ipswich is given the twelve hour shift of guarding her body in a West Suffolk Hospital. The mortuary where she is housed is under heightened security with only a selection of press allowed at the entrance, and even the funeral home where Hindley will eventually be cremated has been placed under tight police security.

As Hindley's crimes once reverberated throughout the psyche of the country, most think that going anywhere near her body will be tantamount to spiritual poisoning. Certainly Billy's wife Sue doesn't hesitate to voice her mixture of concern and outrage. She pleads with her husband not to take the job, fearing that whatever evil Hindley possessed will infect those around her. How could he possibly justify what he was doing? Why was he prepared to put his whole family at risk?

To be sure, it is a sensitive situation and there is so much that could go wrong. So Sue gives him a dark gleaming stone, telling him to wear it around his neck to protect and connect him to the purist part of himself. Billy, however, isn't that concerned about the woman's death and what affect she might have on him, perhaps because it all happened years ago, in the sixties and he doesn't feel sorry, relieved or even cheated.

Against a backdrop of newspaper articles, referring to her as a "sick killer," a "monster," and "the devil," her name synonymous with evil, Billy battles with his own demons, the memories of the past haunting him and none of them offering any respite. Drifting along under the weight of a terrible despair, with his connection to reality failing miserably, Billy worries about his fractured marriage, the lack of intimacy with Sue, and his young daughter, Emma, painfully afflicted with Down's syndrome.

Billy begins his shift and becomes almost drawn to the fridge where her body is being kept, and he feels a little as if he were guarding a phantom, or the figment of someone's imagination. He doesn't quite believe she were there. In a series of flashbacks he remembers his courtship with Sue and the petty disappointments that have characterized much their life together, her early miscarriage and the failed trips India or Thailand, the places that she wanted to go to when she was young.

As the watch continues Billy comes to the horrible recognition that much of his life has been a blank slate, characterized by various disappointments and blame that have spread sideways. While his best friend Raymond once tried to starve him on a trip though Europe, his wealthy father-in-law Newman has used every opportunity to disparage Billy's lack of ambition, indeed everything Newman has done seemed calculated to exclude him.

There's also Billy's disillusionment with the police force, and the terrible realization that he's begun to see this beautiful and damaged baby as a verdict on his marriage to Sue. As he sits and stares at a blank space on the fridge where Hindley's body is housed, contemplating the green of the mortuary doors, Billy is also propelled to remember the tragic Trevor Lydgate, and his terrible confession one night in a hotel room.

When the ghost of Hindley inexplicably appears to Billy, silently chain-smoking, it brings on a rush of astonishing feelings, including an intense feeling of regret for Trevor who is linked forever to the children, "the ones with the names we all know." This woman even in death seems to be able to challenge Billy's long held assumptions about life; its as though the world begins to accelerate away from him in all directions, when at the same time everything remains exactly where it is.

Dark and foreboding, but also psychologically compelling Death of a Murderer is a profound meditation on the human condition that reaches right into the dark heart of the soul. Certainly for Billy this is a time when things seem hard to believe and hard to sustain as his emotions fluctuate between dread and expectation. In the end, this novel leaves you will the feeling of how difficult it is to comprehend how deeply these series of murders had embedded itself in the nation's psyche and no one who had been alive at the time could ever be entirely free of it. Mike Leonard September 07.

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