Serial Killers is one of those books you sometimes see on the bargain table at a bookshop and wonder if it's of much interest. Despite a lurid-looking image of Richard "Night Stalker" Ramirez on the cover and a table of contents covering all the obvious names (Jack the Ripper, Ramirez, Bundy, Dahmer, Chikatilo, Holmes, Gacy, Brady and Hindley, Zodiac, BTK) and a few less obvious ones, this really is a "quickie book", with minimal research, no analysis and only marginal editing.
The phenomenon of the serial killer is fascinating - just look at the crime-fiction and true-crime shelves in your local bookshop and there will be endless variations on the theme in both fictional and non-fictional form. A proper discussion of what makes a serial killer makes great reading, too, particularly when enlivened with examples of the more infamous names and what made them tick. The process of catching a killer, particularly some of the more devious ones, makes great reading, as does the "one that got away" genre, of which Ripperology is but one example.
What we have here, though, is a series of relatively short potted biographies of the various killers, generally with a focus on sex and sexuality, and no real attempts to tease out themes and concepts across more than a century of criminality. Many of the biographies go out of their way to claim lurid sexual motives for the killer in question, including an insistence that Jack the Ripper had this motivation, which is still very much a live debate. Where there's even a hint of homosexuality, that angle is also played up mercilessly, and the reader could be excused for thinking that some 90% of serial killers are same-sex attracted, which is not exactly the case.
Criminologists are cited at times, but usually only by their surnames and in passing. Given that the book has no bibliography, it's impossible to chase up some of the more spectacular assertions ascribed to these experts, most of whom are usually referred to merely as "experts" or "criminologists".
To cap the poor-quality nature of this book, the editing is sloppy and non-existent in places. Dates are often transposed, names (including that of one of the killers!) are misspelled, placenames are rendered in a variety of ways on the same page, one foreign jurist has his name conflated with his title. One of my favourite moments, though, features a misspelling of "murderers" as "murdered", which completely alters the meaning of a passage.
The more infamous figures - particularly those I've named earlier - all have several book-length treatments written by more respectable authors and, particularly in the more recent instances, many of the police investigating the crimes themselves. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any of these over this sensationalist nonsense.
Zero stars.
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