Venice in August is a truly oppressive place, and even more so for Donna Leon's long-suffering Commissario Guido Brunetti, here in his 19th outing exploring the assorted crimes and misdemeanours lurking beneath the surface of that tourist drawcard. Where About Face featured a freezing winter, A Question of Belief demonstrates that stifling humidity which much of Europe suffers as their summer draws to a close. Not for no reason do many Italians take a holiday in August - a fact which plays a number of roles in Brunetti's investigations here.
In typical Leon fashion, A Question of Belief begins in a low-key manner. Brunetti is approached by his investigative partner Vianello who is troubled by his aunt's recent fascination with horoscopes and astrology. While both men agree that this could well be the harmless interest of a mature woman, Vianello at least seems to think that Zia Anita's interest verges on the unhealthy.
No sooner has this question been raised, when Brunetti is contacted by a former schoolfriend who is concerned regarding irregularities at the Tribunale, Venice's court. It appears that certain cases are being delayed (delayed longer than normal, both men remark) to the possible advantage of one party, and that the cases delayed in such a way are brought before a certain judge and administered by a certain clerk.
It is unclear whether anything here is a crime. Brunetti, in fact, asks his friend what he wants him to do, and receives the response, "I hoped you might be able to think of something to do. And I hoped you'd be outraged by it." Brunetti recognises that something is potentially at issue - particularly if money is changing hands - but is resigned to the customary willingness of the Italian establishment to ignore such matters.
Perhaps needless to say, things do develop from here, albeit at Leon's customarily languid pace. Vianello's concerns about his aunt become slightly more serious, as she seems intent on giving large amounts of the family savings to what he describes as "a soothsayer", leading to a very impressive sequence featuring no fewer than three detectives (Brunetti, a young trainee and the under-utilised Pucetti) tailing the woman across Venice to find out the destination of the funds. Again, in the way that only Leon ever really could, the climax of the scene is a deadpan series of remarks at the expense of Venetian real estate prices, brought about by Brunetti's seemingly-inexhaustible understanding of the landscape of the city and its distinctive cadastral street-numbering system.
But of course this is a murder mystery, and Brunetti eventually finds himself suffering the ignoble fate of being recalled from his family vacation in the Italian Alps (along with Vianello, who's been brought back from the Croatian coast on a Coast Guard launch) to investigate the crime. The initial phone call recalling Brunetti, incidentally, is made by Commissario Claudia Griffoni, who was introduced in About Face and perhaps is on the verge of become another series regular - not a bad idea, as the main female characters in the series so far can occasionally become ciphers when Leon needs to cover a lot of plot very quickly.
Brunetti's investigation sees him take in everywhere from the Tribunale itself to the city's medical testing centre and the iconic Madonna dell'Orto church, all of which are described in Leon's inimitable manner. The locations are, of course, real anyway, but reading them there is a palpable sense of them jumping off the page.
It wouldn't be a Donna Leon novel without the domestic interludes, either. While the Brunetti family spend most of the novel in the Alps (and even his in-laws don't get much of a look-in - his redoubtable mother-in-law is only at the end of a phone twice, while his father-in-law is completely absent), we are compensated for this with an extended family dinner scene earlier in the novel. Brunetti's son Raffi is described as having recently adopted Marxism, only to discard it just as quickly, while his daughter Chiara is still the family's conscience, particularly in relation to air-conditioning in the Venetian heat.
The cynicism of both Brunetti and his wife Paola seems to have almost completely rubbed off on both children, though, despite the best intentions of their parents. Given that the series has shown Raffi and Chiara growing up, it becomes increasingly difficult not to view them almost as the children of old friends by this point - one is almost tempted to say "My, how you've grown" on first "meeting" them in the pages of their next novel.
Additionally, the comedy of the Questura is front and centre here. This is very much a good thing, as some parts of this novel do at least attempt to pose tricky questions to the reader (the relationship between psychology and fortune-telling is one such, as is the question of what makes a person "good"), so light relief is never a bad idea.
Vice-Questore Patta is his usual officious self, and his rationales for alternately permitting and preventing Brunetti from doing the most logical things are as cynical as ever. His underling, Lieutenant Scarpa, doesn't get much of an outing here, although the views of many of the detectives about his abilities as a trainer are definitely amusing.
And of course there is the amazing Signorina Elettra, secretary to the Vice-Questore and hacker extraordinaire. Whether or not her skills are remotely plausible is largely irrelevant, as she gets some of the best lines of all here - including her explanation of a purchase order for new computers, her description of the challenges of obtaining certain phone records, and her glorious re-telling of a "date" during which she has attempted to ferret out information for Brunetti.
The real star here in many ways is the city of Venice itself. Not necessarily the landscape, but the culture. Brunetti himself begins his investigation into the Tribunale irregularities by pondering that he knows "a general good feeling" about the judge involved, and a strong theme here (as ever in Leon) is the power of gossip and rumour in a small town like Venice. Key plot developments are arrived at by the power of what characters aren't saying, and Brunetti is asked on several occasions how he intends to prevent reputational damage to his suspects and the victim.
The food, too, is as central as ever. Contrary to common tourist opinion, Venice is a city of great food, and Leon takes considerable pains in describing the plates of chicchetti which are ordered at some points, and the vast array of tramezzini Brunetti and Vianello indulge in during their investigations. Even a takeaway pizza Brunetti buys near the end of the case sounds very appetising indeed.
In all of this, it's tempting to wonder if one strand of the plot may have taken a back seat. Indeed, Vianello does precisely this at one point. While the two investigations don't necessarily move at the same speed, there are surprising and unusual links between them. Leon's mastery of the crime novel form allows her to play around with the idea of the "unconnected cases" in a way that only a writer with a long-established series can.
The conclusions, when they arrive, are satisfyingly unexpected. The solution to the murder may be a little trite for some tastes, but the logic hangs together, and allows Brunetti one last stab at the quirks of criminal justice before his well-deserved return to the Alps and the end of his Ferragosto vacation.
Donna Leon has categorically done it again. Five stars
Tuesday, 28 March 2017
Tuesday, 21 March 2017
Arnaldur Indriðason - "Silence of the Grave"
Reykjavík is the northernmost capital city in the world, just a short distance south of the Arctic Circle. The country it governs - Iceland - is like nowhere else on the planet. This is an island with some 300,000 inhabitants, almost all of whom are direct descendants of the Vikings, and who speak a language closer to the Old Norse of legends and sagas than anything else spoken today. Even the landscape is seemingly from another planet - lava plains and thermal pools predominate, with the island featuring a seemingly endless collection of jagged fjords on its rugged coastline.
Iceland is, to put it mildly, a harsh and unforgiving place. It's also a place which doesn't appear often in the annals of history after the population converted en masse to Christianity around the year 1000 - until recent years when the entire country went bankrupt in one of the more spectacular offshoots of the Global Financial Crisis. It is also, despite being part of Scandinavia, much less on the "ScandiCrime" radar than it should be. While Sweden, Denmark and Norway have a seemingly-endless parade of authors to offer, Iceland's noir qualities seem overlooked with only a couple of exceptions.
One such exception is Arnaldur Indriðason, the author of the Detective Erlendur series, often referred to as the "Reykjavík Murder Mysteries".
Erlendur - Icelanders don't customarily have surnames so much as they have patronymics, so while Erlendur's full name is "Erlendur Sveinsson", that just simply means his father's name was Svein, so he's not "Detective Sveinsson" at all - is the head of a small team in the Reykjavík CID. While it's implied that the team consists of more than the three main characters, we're never really introduced to them, so we get to know a lot about Erlendur and rather a bit less about his younger partner Sigurður Óli and their colleague Elínborg.
Silence of the Grave (Icelandic: Grafarþögn) is chronologically the fourth of Erlendur's cases, but only the second translated into English. This is a common quirk when dealing with ScandiCrime. As many novelists don't necessarily "hit their stride" with their first or second novel, publishers in the Anglophone world are increasingly hesitant to translate anything but a sure-fire hit, and often the earlier novels go untranslated for some time (Norway's Jo Nesbø is another victim of this, having only recently seen his first two novels appear in English), until a fan-base can be shown to exist.
We begin in a typically Icelandic way, with a very spare and very dramatic opening. As translated, the opening line of this novel runs "He knew at once that it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it." Indeed, the translation is really one of the stars of the show here. Icelanders by temperament are taciturn individuals given to a very dour sense of humour, and the late Bernard Scudder was a master at converting their turn of phrase into highly readable English without destroying the essential "Icelandic-ness" of the words.
As the scene develops, it is revealed that a skeleton has been discovered buried underground in a newly-developing area of Reykjavík. Erlendur and his team are dispatched to investigate further, and enlist the help of a young archaeologist, who provides a slightly under-utilised point of comic relief by his constant reminders that excavating the bones is a slow and painstaking process (the police, more used to fresher corpses, find this very difficult to deal with). After confirming that this isn't an unknown Viking-era burial - a surprisingly common discovery in Iceland - the team gets to work attempting to find out what's behind the grisly discovery.
Much of the novel is given over to Erlendur's own family life. In the earlier Jar City (Icelandic: Mýrin), we learned that he had been divorced from his wife Halldóra for many years and had two adult children with whom he had a very difficult relationship. The focus here is on his relationship with his daughter Eva Lind, who has spent much of her life dealing with drug addiction and repeated attempts to go clean. We also learn a little of Erlendur's childhood - a theme to which Arnaldur returns in later novels.
This is possibly a good thing, as it serves to break up the chapters focusing on the investigation. As the death is agreed to have occurred some decades ago, this is an investigation involving a lot of talking to middle-aged and elderly people who frequently have faulty memories of key events, which of course means that there is much less driving around chasing active criminals. Personally, I didn't at all find these interactions boring, as they play into a frequent Arnaldur theme - that secrets lurk beneath the surface in every family or workplace, and that they often have unexpected consequences years later.
Another plot strand is a narrative regarding a young woman in WW2-era Reykjavík. The history of Iceland during the war is somewhat unusual, in that it took advantage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark to declare independence and neutrality, only to be occupied by the UK and US armies in succession, with American influence continuing into the modern day (Reykjavík is home to what is often regarded as the "world's best hot dog stand", and I can attest to its incredible qualities). This was overlaid onto what was at that point still a relatively rural environment - Reykjavík is described by one character as "really just a big town then" - creating a profound social change the likes of which the rest of Europe never really experienced. Going too far into this narrative is to give part of the game away, but I will say that it's a relatively disturbing one at times.
Thankfully, this gloom is balanced out by some enjoyably comic scenes featuring Sigurður Óli and his partner Bergþóra, who is keen to get married and start a family, while he has perhaps some other ideas.
The conclusion to the investigation ties up most of the loose ends, although there are some issues raised from the memories of the various people interviewed that never quite get resolved. In a sense, this simply mirrors real life, where family secrets can be raked over without any real resolution. This can, however, be a minor disappointment when it appears that everything "should" be tied up in the way that most crime novels are.
Arnaldur is in many ways quite a "literary" crime writer. While crimes are committed, investigated and resolved in his novels, a lot of this structure is really an apparatus on which he hangs an interrogation of his own society.
Scandinavian though Iceland may well be, its history and development have been quite different to the social-democratic norms on the mainland. Immigration has been lower, and thus multiculturalism has never really become as dominant a force as in cosmopolitan Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The hard-bitten realities of what realistically remained a predominantly rural society until the post-war "Cod Wars" and the sudden increase in wealth they brought mean that it's only been the last few generations of Icelanders who have really had the same experiences as many others have.
Of course, Arnaldur is far from the only crime novelist to do this. Historically, even Wilkie Collins used The Moonstone to make social commentary, and more recently the obvious touch-stone is the late Stieg Larsson and his first novel - famously titled in Swedish Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who hate women") before its translation to English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Detectives, ultimately, investigate crimes in the societies in which they live, and most crimes do speak about the societies in which they're committed.
All of this is by way of indicating that Silence of the Grave and the other Erlendur novels aren't your standard-issue crime thrillers. They're written to make you think, and perhaps to look at the world in a different way. Not exactly your standard rainy-day escapism that you might think of when the topic of "crime fiction" comes up".
A very strong recommendation. Five stars.
Iceland is, to put it mildly, a harsh and unforgiving place. It's also a place which doesn't appear often in the annals of history after the population converted en masse to Christianity around the year 1000 - until recent years when the entire country went bankrupt in one of the more spectacular offshoots of the Global Financial Crisis. It is also, despite being part of Scandinavia, much less on the "ScandiCrime" radar than it should be. While Sweden, Denmark and Norway have a seemingly-endless parade of authors to offer, Iceland's noir qualities seem overlooked with only a couple of exceptions.
One such exception is Arnaldur Indriðason, the author of the Detective Erlendur series, often referred to as the "Reykjavík Murder Mysteries".
Erlendur - Icelanders don't customarily have surnames so much as they have patronymics, so while Erlendur's full name is "Erlendur Sveinsson", that just simply means his father's name was Svein, so he's not "Detective Sveinsson" at all - is the head of a small team in the Reykjavík CID. While it's implied that the team consists of more than the three main characters, we're never really introduced to them, so we get to know a lot about Erlendur and rather a bit less about his younger partner Sigurður Óli and their colleague Elínborg.
Silence of the Grave (Icelandic: Grafarþögn) is chronologically the fourth of Erlendur's cases, but only the second translated into English. This is a common quirk when dealing with ScandiCrime. As many novelists don't necessarily "hit their stride" with their first or second novel, publishers in the Anglophone world are increasingly hesitant to translate anything but a sure-fire hit, and often the earlier novels go untranslated for some time (Norway's Jo Nesbø is another victim of this, having only recently seen his first two novels appear in English), until a fan-base can be shown to exist.
We begin in a typically Icelandic way, with a very spare and very dramatic opening. As translated, the opening line of this novel runs "He knew at once that it was a human bone, when he took it from the baby who was sitting on the floor chewing it." Indeed, the translation is really one of the stars of the show here. Icelanders by temperament are taciturn individuals given to a very dour sense of humour, and the late Bernard Scudder was a master at converting their turn of phrase into highly readable English without destroying the essential "Icelandic-ness" of the words.
As the scene develops, it is revealed that a skeleton has been discovered buried underground in a newly-developing area of Reykjavík. Erlendur and his team are dispatched to investigate further, and enlist the help of a young archaeologist, who provides a slightly under-utilised point of comic relief by his constant reminders that excavating the bones is a slow and painstaking process (the police, more used to fresher corpses, find this very difficult to deal with). After confirming that this isn't an unknown Viking-era burial - a surprisingly common discovery in Iceland - the team gets to work attempting to find out what's behind the grisly discovery.
Much of the novel is given over to Erlendur's own family life. In the earlier Jar City (Icelandic: Mýrin), we learned that he had been divorced from his wife Halldóra for many years and had two adult children with whom he had a very difficult relationship. The focus here is on his relationship with his daughter Eva Lind, who has spent much of her life dealing with drug addiction and repeated attempts to go clean. We also learn a little of Erlendur's childhood - a theme to which Arnaldur returns in later novels.
This is possibly a good thing, as it serves to break up the chapters focusing on the investigation. As the death is agreed to have occurred some decades ago, this is an investigation involving a lot of talking to middle-aged and elderly people who frequently have faulty memories of key events, which of course means that there is much less driving around chasing active criminals. Personally, I didn't at all find these interactions boring, as they play into a frequent Arnaldur theme - that secrets lurk beneath the surface in every family or workplace, and that they often have unexpected consequences years later.
Another plot strand is a narrative regarding a young woman in WW2-era Reykjavík. The history of Iceland during the war is somewhat unusual, in that it took advantage of the Nazi occupation of Denmark to declare independence and neutrality, only to be occupied by the UK and US armies in succession, with American influence continuing into the modern day (Reykjavík is home to what is often regarded as the "world's best hot dog stand", and I can attest to its incredible qualities). This was overlaid onto what was at that point still a relatively rural environment - Reykjavík is described by one character as "really just a big town then" - creating a profound social change the likes of which the rest of Europe never really experienced. Going too far into this narrative is to give part of the game away, but I will say that it's a relatively disturbing one at times.
Thankfully, this gloom is balanced out by some enjoyably comic scenes featuring Sigurður Óli and his partner Bergþóra, who is keen to get married and start a family, while he has perhaps some other ideas.
The conclusion to the investigation ties up most of the loose ends, although there are some issues raised from the memories of the various people interviewed that never quite get resolved. In a sense, this simply mirrors real life, where family secrets can be raked over without any real resolution. This can, however, be a minor disappointment when it appears that everything "should" be tied up in the way that most crime novels are.
Arnaldur is in many ways quite a "literary" crime writer. While crimes are committed, investigated and resolved in his novels, a lot of this structure is really an apparatus on which he hangs an interrogation of his own society.
Scandinavian though Iceland may well be, its history and development have been quite different to the social-democratic norms on the mainland. Immigration has been lower, and thus multiculturalism has never really become as dominant a force as in cosmopolitan Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The hard-bitten realities of what realistically remained a predominantly rural society until the post-war "Cod Wars" and the sudden increase in wealth they brought mean that it's only been the last few generations of Icelanders who have really had the same experiences as many others have.
Of course, Arnaldur is far from the only crime novelist to do this. Historically, even Wilkie Collins used The Moonstone to make social commentary, and more recently the obvious touch-stone is the late Stieg Larsson and his first novel - famously titled in Swedish Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who hate women") before its translation to English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Detectives, ultimately, investigate crimes in the societies in which they live, and most crimes do speak about the societies in which they're committed.
All of this is by way of indicating that Silence of the Grave and the other Erlendur novels aren't your standard-issue crime thrillers. They're written to make you think, and perhaps to look at the world in a different way. Not exactly your standard rainy-day escapism that you might think of when the topic of "crime fiction" comes up".
A very strong recommendation. Five stars.
Sunday, 12 March 2017
Frank Moorhouse - "Cult Killers"
What do the "Son of Sam" killer, the Night Stalker, Brisbane's own "Lesbian Vampire Murderers", the killing of Euronymous in the early Norwegian Black Metal scene and Hendrik Möbus of the band Absurd have in common? If you answered "not much", you're right. Well, you're right with the exception of all of the above featuring in this confused true-crime effort.
Written in 2007, Cult Killers purports on its front and back covers to be all about "the most unpredictable and dangerous killers in history", as well as a look at how the occult legacy of the 1960s inspired them. What it really is, frankly, is a very breezy attempt at saying "Here are some pretty crazy murders. And I'll throw in a half-baked look at Satanism into the bargain."
Moorhouse begins with what he clearly intends to be an analysis of how Satanism and the occult became mainstream through the 1960s and onwards. Many of the key names you would expect to see in such a discussion are present - Anton La Vey and Aleister Crowley are given a long appearance each, for example. Where he begins to fall down, though, is the point at which he tries to link the views of these men and their followers to the "mainstream" of culture. Just because the Rolling Stones had a song called "Sympathy for the Devil", for example, doesn't mean that they actually paid more than lip service to La Vey and his Church of Satan, but don't let that stop Moorhouse drawing out his tendentious links.
Slightly more successfully, Moorhouse also describes the troubled upbringings of people like Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil and leads us to the infamous killings by Manson's "Family" and their aftermath. While Manson and his cult have been written about more than enough over the years, I get the sense that this is the kind of thing which Moorhouse actually wanted to write about.
After this, we move into potted histories of twelve murders and murderers. Some of these, as outlined above, are certainly well-known in the public consciousness. Others, at least as far as I'm aware, are only known by smaller groups. Exactly what the link is between them all is a bit obscure, given Moorhouse's own explanations of the events in question.
To be charitable, it's possible to say that the common thread is that all of these killers were motivated by a fascination with Satanism. At least, it would be easier to take this view if Moorhouse weren't so fond of demonstrating that many of these killers were willing to adopt their Satanic posturing post facto, something he begins doing straight away in relation to David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz in the first of these potted histories.
Occasionally, Moorhouse appears to forget what he's ostensibly writing about. His chapter on Varg Vikernes and the early Black Metal scene in Norway makes the common mistake of conflating Satanism and Paganism (and, in Vikernes' case, quite possibly a brand of Fascism), which is the sort of conflation which doesn't help at all when trying to appreciate the style of music. This is amplified in the following chapter, which outlines Hendrik Möbus' crimes as part of the German band Absurd - Möbus was and is a neo-Nazi if he's anything, but we're treated to all sorts of unsourced ramblings about Satanism.
Occasionally, Moorhouse lets a lack of research show. The "Lesbian Vampire Killers" chapter, looking at the (at least locally famous) murder by Tracy Wigginton and Lisa Ptaschinski, contains some overgeneralisations about Brisbane and Queensland at the time of the murder - 1989. The casual reader could be left with the impression, for example, that Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a member of the One Nation Party. Moorhouse is also quite fond of describing Brisbane at that time as "Tiny Town", which seems rather needless.
Several of the killers discussed here seem to have fantasised about being vampires, and Moorhouse is clearly very taken with this (there's surely a book in this somewhere as well, and just as surely it's already been written). What emerges, though, is a sense of troubled young people who got caught up in their own fantasies rather than any really "cultish" behaviour, which again spoils the effect.
Lastly, Moorhouse includes a brief chapter trying to explain why all of these killers would have done what they did. While this is promising, as a lot of books like this simply confine themselves to a blow-by-blow rendition of killing after killing, he again squibs the opportunity. His nostrums tend to be closer to "Don't ignore your children" and "TV can sometimes be bad", rather than anything more serious.
In the final analysis, Cult Killers just doesn't work. Moorhouse never really seems certain about what he wants to say, and the net result is a confused book that tries to cover too many things and does them very badly.
Perhaps the good news in a book like this is that the bibliography includes a few interesting works on the crimes mentioned should one wish to investigate further. Sadly, the bibliography also demonstrates that Moorhouse did most of his research via very sketchily-written newspaper articles. For that reason, the reader interested in any of the crimes covered here would be better-placed to read the works cited, rather than this one.
One star.
Written in 2007, Cult Killers purports on its front and back covers to be all about "the most unpredictable and dangerous killers in history", as well as a look at how the occult legacy of the 1960s inspired them. What it really is, frankly, is a very breezy attempt at saying "Here are some pretty crazy murders. And I'll throw in a half-baked look at Satanism into the bargain."
Moorhouse begins with what he clearly intends to be an analysis of how Satanism and the occult became mainstream through the 1960s and onwards. Many of the key names you would expect to see in such a discussion are present - Anton La Vey and Aleister Crowley are given a long appearance each, for example. Where he begins to fall down, though, is the point at which he tries to link the views of these men and their followers to the "mainstream" of culture. Just because the Rolling Stones had a song called "Sympathy for the Devil", for example, doesn't mean that they actually paid more than lip service to La Vey and his Church of Satan, but don't let that stop Moorhouse drawing out his tendentious links.
Slightly more successfully, Moorhouse also describes the troubled upbringings of people like Charles Manson and Bobby Beausoleil and leads us to the infamous killings by Manson's "Family" and their aftermath. While Manson and his cult have been written about more than enough over the years, I get the sense that this is the kind of thing which Moorhouse actually wanted to write about.
After this, we move into potted histories of twelve murders and murderers. Some of these, as outlined above, are certainly well-known in the public consciousness. Others, at least as far as I'm aware, are only known by smaller groups. Exactly what the link is between them all is a bit obscure, given Moorhouse's own explanations of the events in question.
To be charitable, it's possible to say that the common thread is that all of these killers were motivated by a fascination with Satanism. At least, it would be easier to take this view if Moorhouse weren't so fond of demonstrating that many of these killers were willing to adopt their Satanic posturing post facto, something he begins doing straight away in relation to David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz in the first of these potted histories.
Occasionally, Moorhouse appears to forget what he's ostensibly writing about. His chapter on Varg Vikernes and the early Black Metal scene in Norway makes the common mistake of conflating Satanism and Paganism (and, in Vikernes' case, quite possibly a brand of Fascism), which is the sort of conflation which doesn't help at all when trying to appreciate the style of music. This is amplified in the following chapter, which outlines Hendrik Möbus' crimes as part of the German band Absurd - Möbus was and is a neo-Nazi if he's anything, but we're treated to all sorts of unsourced ramblings about Satanism.
Occasionally, Moorhouse lets a lack of research show. The "Lesbian Vampire Killers" chapter, looking at the (at least locally famous) murder by Tracy Wigginton and Lisa Ptaschinski, contains some overgeneralisations about Brisbane and Queensland at the time of the murder - 1989. The casual reader could be left with the impression, for example, that Joh Bjelke-Petersen was a member of the One Nation Party. Moorhouse is also quite fond of describing Brisbane at that time as "Tiny Town", which seems rather needless.
Several of the killers discussed here seem to have fantasised about being vampires, and Moorhouse is clearly very taken with this (there's surely a book in this somewhere as well, and just as surely it's already been written). What emerges, though, is a sense of troubled young people who got caught up in their own fantasies rather than any really "cultish" behaviour, which again spoils the effect.
Lastly, Moorhouse includes a brief chapter trying to explain why all of these killers would have done what they did. While this is promising, as a lot of books like this simply confine themselves to a blow-by-blow rendition of killing after killing, he again squibs the opportunity. His nostrums tend to be closer to "Don't ignore your children" and "TV can sometimes be bad", rather than anything more serious.
In the final analysis, Cult Killers just doesn't work. Moorhouse never really seems certain about what he wants to say, and the net result is a confused book that tries to cover too many things and does them very badly.
Perhaps the good news in a book like this is that the bibliography includes a few interesting works on the crimes mentioned should one wish to investigate further. Sadly, the bibliography also demonstrates that Moorhouse did most of his research via very sketchily-written newspaper articles. For that reason, the reader interested in any of the crimes covered here would be better-placed to read the works cited, rather than this one.
One star.
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