Happy Like Murderers

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Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn | Goodreads

urn:lcp:happylikemurdere0000burn:epub:7966c6c1-4ad3-45a2-ba8a-b3f4cb92be69 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier happylikemurdere0000burn Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t46r31j6z Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780571265060 One of the saddest and most moving murder cases is that of Keith Bennett. Known to be one of the victims of the Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the pair never shared the location of his body. They murdered five children in total, three found on Saddleworth Moor in shallow graves and the other in their home. 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. Terribly sad but powerfully compelling, this is another book true crime lovers will need in their collection. So in conclusion, I would recommend this book if you have an interest in the West murders, but with the following reservations - that firstly it's highly upsetting, and secondly will not give you a full view of the case. Richard Williams writes: Sport is not always kind to the sort of writers who like to see if two plus two can somehow make five, but Gordon Burn was an exception. Gordon wrote well and interestingly about almost anything, but he brought to his books and columns about sport a balanced combination of insight, enthusiasm, forensic skills and imagination. However it cannot be said to be the only book about the West you need to read. The key problem is that the actual investigation, arrest and trial are only very briefly examined in the final chapter. And although Burn has avoided speculation, and rightly so in the main, there are some issues where I felt some commentary was necessary. For example, the question of how many more murders, other than the twelve that went to trial, were committed really needed to be mentioned more fully. Similarly the issue of whether or not Rose was party to the murders also warranted remarking on.

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When I first heard about this book, I was unsure of how this style would work. My feeling was that too much narrative and desription might overwhelm the facts of the case and possibly stumble into the tar-pit of unfounded speculation and outright fabrication in creating some scenes. However I can report that Burn has done an excellent job in crafting this work and manages to illustrate the events rather embroider them. Stylistically, Burn uses the repetition and variations of certain key phrases that sketch in atmosphere and psychological themes. Some readers may find these echoes in the text annoying, but I found them to an elegant device which highlight the progression of the West's crimes, illuminate the links between past and present events, and reiterate recurring impressions and opinions. And the rest of Ronnie Cooper’s men would go drinking together regularly but Fred never wanted to go. He wouldn’t mix with anybody. Good worker, mind. Brilliant worker. He became known for moving large sheets of metal manually rather than wait for the crane to move them. He was very strong and wouldn’t wait because he was on piecework. Always at work. He’d work all the hours God sends. But he wouldn’t mix. He wouldn’t drink. He never drank. He wouldn’t go to a pub at all and always said he was too busy if they asked. Said he had too much to do. So what made this book so hard to get through? Although details of the murders are few, there is a lot known about life at 25 Cromwell Road, in the main from the recollections of three of the West's children. For this book, Burn extensively researched and interviewed family, friends and co-workers and has built up a detailed picture of The West's lives - not just the major events but their day-to-day routines over the years. And it is this emerging picture that is so upsetting to read. Burns started by writing about the world he knew. He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, the only child of a mother who worked at Binns, the city's department store, and a father who was a paint-sprayer. He had an outside lavatory, an uncle who kept pigeons and a regular place in the teenage queue for football stars' autographs outside St James's Park.

Happy like murderers : Burn, Gordon, 1948-2009 : Free

Books like this shine lights of horror on aspects of society we generally leave to the most hapless social services. Incest families. Throwaway children. Disappearing teenagers. Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers (Faber & Faber 1998) is a very difficult book. At several points during reading this, the book was put down for several days and it was touch and go whether I'd return to it. But return I did, and eventually finished it. And I can't say I was glad to either - on one hand, it was good to get to the end of an exceedingly tough book but even after you finish it tends to linger in the mind for a good long while. Tengo muchisima experiencia leyendo libros de true crime, no es un genero nuevo para mi, por eso me doy cuenta enseguida si un libro lo considero bien ejecutado o no..este caso es un no. Gordon Burn nos relata con lujo de detalle los terribles acontecimientos ocurridos en la casa de Rose y Fred West, donde fueron hallados los cadáveres de varias mujeres, incluyendo el de Heather, la hija mayor de los West. El autor va más allá de la casa, y nos transporta al pasado de estos asesinos en serie, intentando comprender y encontrar el origen de tanta maldad.

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Gordon Burn was an English writer born in Newcastle upon Tyne and the author of four novels and several works of non-fiction. The bowel cancer from which Burns died was diagnosed only recently, and it is not yet clear whether his latest novel, set in Rome in the 1950s and again illuminated by coincidences, will be published posthumously. The fascination with celebrity continued in his final journalism, including a piece on Jade Goody for the Guardian.

Happy Like Murderers - AbeBooks Happy Like Murderers - AbeBooks

The book scotched the initial suspicions that surround a writer venturing on to such potentially exploitative territory, and allowed him to move on, reflectively and to good purpose, to studies of Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors murderers (fictionalised in his Whitbread-winning novel Alma Cogan, visualising how the singer's life could have gone had she not died in 1966) and even the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. 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. La maldad está en todos lados, en un rostro amable, en una mano amiga, y tal vez en el lugar menos esperado, tu propia familia.Hence a reader who makes it to the end of this book, may be have to cast about for another account to get the complete picture. Now I'm was in this boat, and though I felt I should while the facts from Happy Like Murderers are fresh in the mind, to be honest, reading another book on the Wests was not a prospect I relished. However I did end up making a trip to the local library and skimmed through a couple of tomes to answer some of my questions on the case. Of the several I looked at, I would recommned Colin Wilson's The Corpse Garden (True Crime Library/Forum Press 1998) which is a concise but through account of the facts of the case with some interesting psychological analysis thrown in. Here’s a good question for all you lovers of literature – what’s the connection between Fred West and the Booker Prize? Answer: one of the 11 females he killed was Martin Amis’s cousin. Este libro nos cuenta la historia de Fred y Rose West, seguramente a más de alguno se les harán familiares sus nombres, pues lamentablemente, estamos ante un caso real.

Happy Like Murderers | Faber

Por muy próximo al prisionero que esté el torturador, la distancia entre las realidades físicas de ambos es inmensa. El prisionero padece un dolor abromador, mientras que su verdugo no siente ninguno en absoluto..." No hay dudas sobre la capacidad de investigacion de Gordon Burn, pero al momento de plasmar toda esa investigacion/conocimiento encuentro grandes fallas. Este libro es posiblemente el libro mas perverso que he leído en mi vida. Si existiera la biblioteca prohibida de Harry Potter este libro estaría ahí. Este libro me hizo entender a los censores.But then there are those true crime books which rise above the mere marshalling of detail and become by authorial alchemy a kind of literature ( The Executioner's Song, In Cold Blood). Happy Like Murderers is in that class. I recommend it for anyone looking for something often promised but seldom delivered, a book like no other. You don't have to be a true crime fan to read this one, although it might help, because you have to be plenty tough-minded. This is a very unpleasant read. La estructura del libro no sigue un hilo coherente, salta de temas una y otra vez, revisita temas ya expuestos hasta el hartazgo, sinceramente leer a Gordon Burn es agotador. Burn also collaborated with his fellow northerner Damien Hirst (who grew up in Leeds) in an illustrated collection of interviews spanning a decade – On the Way to Work (2001) – after writing the text in 1997 for the artist's I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone … Burn's remarkable ability to combine such tasks with all his other work was also shown by the award in 1991 naming him the UK's magazine columnist of the year. It went to his sports column in Esquire. Es un libro que me hizo sentir sucia, monstruosa, y a la vez, decente, pues por mas que pueda tener esas ideas en la cabeza, (y de cierta forma es lo que el quería, enfrentarlo a uno con su monstruo interior) realizarlas me parecería una atrocidad. Es un libro que no recomendaría a cualquier lector, solo a los que están realmente interesados en este tipo de casos y tienen algo de experiencia leyendo sobre estos temas. Si van a leer solo por morbo, perderán su tiempo, pues el autor está muy bien documentado, el nivel de detalles que entrega es elevado y podría parecer repetitivo por momentos.