Book 61 - Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn

Reading date - January 2021

The last book of the month.  This is one review I wrote right after reading, hence the tenses being all over the place.  It has taken me over a week to read this because it is so full on that I need to put it down and do something else for a while.  

This book was suggested to me by one of my mates after I finished reading Killing for Company, which, compared to this is like a toe dip into a pool of depravity.  However, I know both are not written in the same style or for the same purpose so I shan't compare them any further.  I think when it comes down to it, I prefer Killing for Company because bar the last psych heavy chapter, it's better written in that it's direct and straight to the point and the chronology is not all over the shop.  Detail is good but you need to strike the right balance and make sure you're not just re-hashing the same stuff over and over again and boring the reader with inconsequential details.

I started with very very high hopes.  I started to flag in the last 150 pages.  It started out as a solid 4 star book.  This book is so relentless, it punches you in the stomach and whilst you're still winded, it comes back for more.  It does this funny thing where it mentions something nice and then juxtaposes it with something grim.. e.g. "the children played in the basement by the chimney.  15 bodies were dug up from under the chimney breast when the police came to Cromwell Street."

The first 80 odd pages are about one of the survivors, but the way it is told, you think that this person would be central but then we hardly hear from her again.  In itself, that is pointless because she is only mentioned here and there throughout the book and then bam, right at the end.

There is also a lot of detail about the person who lived in 25 Cromwell Street before the Wests', there is far too much detail about this person and her ancestors and her relatives.  There is also far too much detail about what that family used the cellar for and how it looked.  This is stated more than four times in the book and towards the latter parts I was just waiting for it to be mentioned again.  I think a reason why this is done is to show the reader what depravity can take place in places such normal things take place.  Burn mentions loads of times how the house looked when the family prior to the Wests' had the house.  There is also a lot of mention of their old landlord who helped them obtain the huge 25 Cromwell Street house.  I wasn't sure why this had been done but I think it was to provide some kind of balance or to show how they worked in the real world, showing that no matter how depraved, they walk among us (hey, hey?)

There are parts where it tells you things as fact and then says "we only have Fred's word for this".  Annoying.  There are things I have read in this book which will stick with me for years to come and for parts of it, I was wishing I had lost the ability to read.  I knew they they killed their own kids and fucked them.  I didn't know that they cut their bodies so deeply that there were marks on the bones.  I didn't know that parts of the bodies were never ever found.  I maintain that Fred was hiding these bones or disposing of them when Stephen told him the jig was up.  Where else could he have been?

The amount of minute details which are featured here is just something else.   However, a lot of the info is presented in a slapdash kind of way.  It is a bit like the human version of Charlie's letter posting board in It's Always Sunny.  The facts are there and you're rushing around like a nutter trying to connect dots.

Charlie and his board

It is not just about the Wests in a vacuum, it is the Wests' microcosm.  Little facts mentioned in chapters beforehand are brought back into later chapters where they feature much more heavily.  I can't record how many times this is done but it is a lot.  It is a testament to what a good writer Gordon Burn is, that I can read a chapter on Monday that mentions a certain place and then by the Monday of the next week, when it is brought up in a later chapter, I still remember the detail I need. 

The book is also the story of the people the murdered and how they possibly were linked to them beforehand, it tells of how many people they killed, where they found them, how they found them and the best thing is, it lays the facts out for you and lets you decide what you want to decide.

I always thought that Rose West was a fat, dumpy bird and I couldn't figure out how so many men wanted to pork her.  I'm not saying that fat birds don't get blokes cos I know they clearly do.  I mean the photos of her don't show her as being a sex symbol, she's there in her NHS specs, oversized jumper, market leggings and a very masculine haircut.  This book makes it clear that when the crimes were actually being committed, she was a lot younger and she didn't look the way she does in headlines.  She was a right goer, by all accounts and slept with anything that had a pulse (own siblings and children included).  After doing some further research, it transpires she put on the bulk of the pudding when she was on remand.  What a lot of people (myself included) don't realise is that there was a massive gap between the girls being murdered and the bodies being found, like 20 plus years.

This book is not one for the faint-hearted.  I have a strong constitution, well, I can't stand blood, I can only touch meat when it's cooked, as a youth I used to weep in butchers' shops and I can't stand seeing people getting injected but on the whole, I can take a lot.  This book was pushing even me to my limits. 

It's very in-depth, it covers things I didn't expect it to cover, for example, it covers Rose and her relationship with her parents, where she used to work, how she went out, places her and Fred loved (you'll never look at a bus stop the same again after reading this book), how Fred was at work, what the surrounding area was like, who made the now infamous 25 Cromwell Street sign and how people ended up at the house, be they as lodgers or victims of murder.

As in most cases, these two were liked by people outside the house.  Rose was seen as motherly yet young to the waifs and strays of the area and Fred, despite being a massive bullshitter, was really liked at work.

The book goes a long way in explaining why they were both the way they were, there is no excuse for what they did, of course.  They deserve the worst punishment and I hope Rose suffers every single day of her life, Fred already took the coward's way out of a sentence and killed himself whilst on remand.  I am not saying cowards commit suicide, he is a coward because he did what he wanted to do then instead of facing justice, he wimped out and killed himself.  Fred was a country bumpkin and was always told he was allowed to interfere with his kids and that's what he did.  Rose, I ain't so sure about, I know her dad was super strict and I think she is just a randy old cow who doesn't like to be told no.  My belief is, and always has been, that Fred was under Rose's spell and I have loads of evidence that backs that up.

There are things I don't like about this book.

It jumped around chronologically, that made it pretty confusing to keep up with what was going on.  I mean one second May was 11, then she was just born, then she was 2 and then she was 7.  This, alone, makes it hard to keep up with how things progressed in real time.  For this, the chapters work well in a standalone way but it struggles to flow as a book because it keeps jumping forwards and backwards and assumes that all readers are fully involved in the case and know all the dates of everything.

There is a lot of slut shaming in this book, which I find sad and annoying.  There is a notion that prostitutes and women who like to sleep around deserve to be killed or they ask for it because they roam the streets.  So what?  Why is it women who get told to be careful and not men who get told to not rape and kill?  The book states so many times that Rena was a goer, that she loved sex.  So what? She wasn't a deviant.  She didn't interfere with kids and she didn't murder.  She was the victim.  It's mindsets like these that let serial killers like the Yorkshire Ripper and the Suffolk Strangler get away with so much, because people think prostitutes won't be missed.  

The book goes to great lengths to explain what the West house looked like, how they kept changing it but despite there being so much descriptive work put into this, it is done in a piecemeal way and far far away from the last amendment to the house so it's really confusing to keep up with that.

It is very repetitive.  I mean how many times do you need to tell me that Fred was told that it was his responsibility to break his daughters in?  How many times do I need to be told that Rose liked fucking black guys? How many times do I need to be told that Fred never washed? I get it.

In the end, it gets three stars because of the reasons outlined above.  This doesn't make it a bad book, book, 3 stars is still a book I would suggest to read.  3 stars are the books I am glad I've read but wouldn't read again..I'd still suggest them.  2 stars is where you're in enemy territory.