Happy Like Murderers

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He said to my sister (about 18/19 at the time) that if she wanted to know about sex she should come to one of his parties, in fact he was having one tonight, why didn't she and Trevor (her husband) come along? Visitors remark it was always a building site, but then he seemed to revel in chaos, noise and upheaval.

Gordon Burn | Gordon Burn | The Guardian Gordon Burn | Gordon Burn | The Guardian

In all of them, as with his books on snooker stars and the Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best, he dealt with previously sensationalised subjects in an unsensational way.

The irony here is that the community, based on a system of exclusion and marginalisation, worked mainly in Fred West’s favour. They are both about notorious serial killers and the books are shocking indeed, but these are brilliantly written.

Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn | Goodreads

The voice forms a neat counterpoint to the myth of community which politicians and others would like us to accept: warm beer and cricket on the green; tight-knit working-class neighbourhoods where nobody locks their doors, and everybody knows everybody else’s business. His literature and impulse always represented to me an attempt to find comfort, meaning and compassion in the most appalling or baffling of events. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon. I don't know what Gordon Burns intended by writing this book, but that was what I got out of it: an intent to question why and how the public can be so fascinated by the Wests, and others like them.

He was accused in the 1970s of hiring an assassin to take out his alleged ex-lover, and Preston’s account is both eye-opening and graphic in its undoing of the subject. She seems to enjoy her position as Fred’s sex slave, to glory in her role as the woman who can’t be satisfied, the gaping hole which no man can completely fill. His style is uncompromising; as in a novel, he plays games with chronology, to create a continuum of abuse (a continuum which reflects the testimony and experiences of the victims, as they try to piece together the half-memories and shadowy images of their ordeal and its aftermath). Keith’s body has still not been recovered, and in Staff’s book The Lost Boy, he puts forward a case for where the body might be.

Happy Like Murderers | Faber Happy Like Murderers | Faber

Acclaim for Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son was followed by similar receptions for Alma Cogan (1991), which won the Whitbread first novel award the following year, and Burn's second novel, Fullalove, which made the Booker's 20-strong "long shortlist" in 1995. This book details the abuse and murders carried out by Rose and Fred West to numerous children and young people across several decades at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester and various other locations around Gloucestershire. With great interest newly awakened by the tremendous dramatisation on television, 'Appropriate Adult', with Dominic West and Emily Watson, this signed copy is now much sought after. This isn't to say that this is a fictionalized account of the proceedings, but it is does use a good deal of literary flourishes that are more commonly found in a novel. By the time I was finished-- by the time I was a hundred pages in-- I was pretty much incapable of objective judgement.It's like a 500 page oral history, like Gordon Burn has given up his author's authority or it's been wrested from him by 500 English working class voices woven together into a seamless demotic fractured multitextured whispering mumbling muttering onrushing torrent. True crime is so mainstream now, and you can't go more than a few days without reading some kind of high-minded justification for it, and none of those reasons go into this book; you (or at least I) finish it feeling voyeuristic, and soiled.