Serial Killers: Top 5 Non- Fiction Books About Real Serial Killers. The minds of Serial killers are fascinating to explore from the safety and distance provided by a book. There have been many books written about real life serial killers and some have even been turned into great movies. The books in this list are the best selling and the most critically acclaimed books about serial killers. Holmes, a serial killer famous for his Chicago “murder castle” where he tortured and killed his victims. Serial Killers & Mass Murderers - Biography: Books. Showing 1 - 20 of 396 results. Confession of a Serial Killer.The other half of the book is about Daniel H. Burnham, the architect behind Chicago’s world fair. Vincent Bugliosi was the prosecutor of Charles Manson. His book, Helter Skelter explores the life of Charles Manson from his pre- Family days up to the brutal crimes, and the sick minds behind them. There are actually two stories in this book. One describes the gradual disintegration of a seemingly normal, affable man into a sexual psychopath so evil and methodical in his vicious killings, that one wonders if he was at all human. The other story is that of Ann Rule herself and how she came to know this man. This is the best book written about Ted Bundy, one of the best known serial killers in the world. Carlo provides one of the most thorough true crime works on the serial killer Richard Ramirez. Crimeculture. David Schmid, University at Buffalo. How can one provide a reasonably sized overview of a field as large, diverse, and continually expanding as serial killer fiction? By reminding ourselves that fiction about serial murder shares several features with serial killer non- fiction: its history goes back a lot further than one might think; the lines between fiction and non- fiction often blur in examples of this genre; it owes a considerable debt to law enforcement discourses about serial murder; and examples of it can be found on both sides of the high/low culture divide. Thanks partly to the debt many serial killer narratives have to the Gothic literary tradition multiple murder is quite a common feature of Gothic- influenced early American literature. As Philip Simpson explains in one of the most useful analyses of fictional texts about serial killers, Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction (2. Ormond (1. 79. 9), Nick of the Woods (1. The Partisan (1. 83. The Quaker City: or, The Monks of Monk Hall (1. Ripping Yarns While I would not disagree with Simpson's observation, I think it more helpful to look to a later period for the true origins of serial killer fiction. Just as non- fictional serial killer texts often take their inspiration from the notorious crimes of the day, so too do their fictional counterparts. Not surprisingly, therefore, we find a significant number of fictional texts around the first, and in some ways still the most, notorious case of serial murder: the Jack the Ripper murders of 1. Revealingly, when we consider the current iconic status of the serial killer in American culture, most of these fictional texts were dime novels published in the United States, thus testifying to the intense American fascination with the Whitechapel murders. Serial Killer Fiction. David Schmid, University at Buffalo. How can one provide a reasonably sized overview of a field as large, diverse, and continually expanding as. Books shelved as serial-killers-fiction: Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Perfume: T. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. There is also the somewhat unrelated story of a serial killer of children. These days, it's hard to find a crime fiction which doesn't include a serial killer: A single death might seem to boring or insignificant to shape a novel around. Looking for Serial Killer Books? Browse a list of books tagged 'serial killer' by our club members to find the best serial killer books. Serial killers have always stirred up a wide range of powerful feelings, from terror to fascination. There are numerous fiction and nonfiction books about. Thrills and chills: The top 10 books about serial killers FANCY something to go with a nice chianti? The Weight Of Blood author Laura McHugh has selected. A serial killer is a person who murders three or more people, usually in service of abnormal psychological gratification, with the murders taking place over more than. In some respects, dime novels share an important commonality with the huge number of contemporaneous press reports about the Ripper because, as Michael Denning has argued, . Moreover.. dime novel plots were often constructed out of the events reported in the daily and weekly newspapers of cities around the country. The dime novels based on Jack the Ripper illustrate Denning's point and indicate that their authors drew inspiration from international as well as American crimes. In other respects, however, these fictional accounts need to be placed in a separate category from newspaper reports, because they had the freedom, denied to the press, to offer imaginative solutions to the Ripper murders that reveal a great deal about what was at stake, ideologically speaking, in assigning responsibility for the Whitechapel killings. The dime novel entitled The Whitechapel Murders: Or, on the Track of the Fiend , for example, written by . The detective hero in this case, with the impeccably American name of Clint West, joins forces with a French detective, Jules Henri (a move surely calculated to upset a British audience!) in their search for the Ripper, who they believe is a mad Russian. Ironically, although West and Henri are utterly contemptuous of the efforts of the British to capture the Ripper, the generic peculiarities of the dime novel require that they fail again and again to capture the Ripper themselves, despite having numerous chances to do so. Lawson's dime novel, published as an entry in the Log Cabin Library and entitled Jack the Ripper in New York; or, Piping A Terrible Mystery, takes its inspiration from the real- life murder of Carrie Brown in Manhattan in 1. Jack the Ripper had moved to the United States. Set in a district of the city that Lawson describes as . Pinkerton's detective novel, The Whitechapel Murders; Or, An American Detective in London, published by the Chicago firm of Laird & Lee in November, 1. Like his fellow dime- novel authors, Pinkerton is unconstrained by the need to stick to the facts of the case and so is free to come up with an inventive solution to the murders, and he doesn't disappoint his reader. In the course of a lurid and melodramatic tale, Pinkerton's American detective hero (who just happens to be in London working on another case) concludes that . Pinkerton's choice of perpetrator is interesting for several reasons. First, in making the Ripper a woman, Pinkerton taps into a common vein of speculation during the murders that a woman could have committed the crimes (a homicidal midwife was a particularly popular theory). Second, by making the Ripper Native American, Pinkerton not only draws on a long- established discourse of Indian savagery, while confirming the suspicion that the Ripper is American, but does so in a way that protects white male Americans from suspicion by making the Ripper an American 'other.' The Ripper's Long Shadow The main reason the Whitechapel case still resonates in the popular cultural memory, of course, is the continuing mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity, and this mystery is exactly what makes him such an appealing protagonist for serial killer fiction, so much so that these nineteenth- century dime novels constitute a kind of template for the serial killer fiction which comes later. Although the fact that the Ripper was still at large was undoubtedly disturbing to late nineteenth- century audiences, authors were able to address that sense of unease by organizing their fictional narratives around law enforcement figures of one kind or another, a feature that still distinguishes many examples of serial killer fiction to this day. The continued mystery surrounding the Ripper, however, also had its advantages; it allowed both authors and readers maximum latitude in imagining what kind of person Jack was, what he looked like, and the solution to his real identity. As the dime novels suggest, and as many contemporary serial killer narratives confirm, one possible solution to the mystery was to accentuate the serial killer's outlandishness and difference from the norm, either by making him conspicuously foreign, or by giving him flagrantly perverted or unusual compulsions. Another alternative, however, was to accentuate the serial killer's ordinariness, and this is what we see in the next significant example of serial killer fiction, Marie Belloc Lowndes' 1. The Lodger. Inspired by a dinner party conversation with a woman who was convinced Jack the Ripper had boarded in that woman's house, Lowndes' Mr. Sleuth, the character who may or may not be the Ripper, remains a shadowy figure, normal almost to the point of total anonymity. The most important legacy of the Jack the Ripper dime novels and of Lowndes' book for later serial killer fiction, however, is the way these early examples of the genre are inspired by real cases. If many non- fictional texts about serial murder (especially in the true crime genre) blur the line between non- fiction and fiction by using novelistic techniques, many fictional texts achieve the same blurring by a different means and give their treatments of serial murder a certain authority or objectivity by drawing in a more or less obvious fashion on the details of actual incidents of serial murder. A good example of this trend is a landmark text by a key modern mythographer of serial murder, Robert Bloch's Psycho. The author of one of the most influential texts inspired by the Whitechapel murders, the short story . How much of Gein's case actually makes it into Psycho is debatable and ultimately unimportant; what matters is that the novel's connection with Gein gives it an air of legitimacy and authority and has thus undoubtedly helped to cement the book's reputation as the ultimate fictional look inside a killer's mind. Personally, I would give that honor to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me , a true classic of serial killer fiction. Working in the publishing ghetto of pulp paperback originals and in a year (1. Thompson produced a total of six novels (!), Killer is a groundbreaking first- person account of how a serial murderer thinks, with all of that killer's contradictions, self- justifications, and the blackest of black humor. Best of all, the killer is the local sheriff, indicating just how axiomatic the belief that . The reason for the rapid growth of fiction about serial killers during this period is the F. B. I.'s success in both building up a full- scale moral panic around serial murder, and establishing the Bureau as the solution to the 'epidemic' of marauding serial killers plaguing the land. Just as its hunting down of gangsters in the 1. F. B. I. At first glance, Thomas Harris' novels, easily the most popular and influential examples of serial killer fiction ever written, appear to owe their success to their fetishization of the F. B. I. The reality, however, is more complicated. Thomas Harris and the Supporting Cast Rather than satisfying itself wholly with the law enforcement perspective on serial murder, Harris' work avoids the extremes of either attacking the F. B. I. This is one reason why his work has made such a strong impression on readers of serial killer fiction. Philip Jenkins has discussed the significance of Harris' work for popularizing not only the mind- hunter image of the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit, but also the investigative techniques and methods of the F. B. I. Although there is a lot of truth to what Jenkins says, there is a degree of irony in the fact that Harris' work gave such a boost to the F. B. I.'s authority over serial murder when we consider the fact that Harris' most famous book, The Silence of the Lambs, contains a major implied criticism of the Bureau (and thus, also by implication, of its definition of and approach to serial murder). Although for much of Silence, the resources and investigative techniques of the F. B. I. However, it is in fact Clarice who eventually finds and kills Buffalo Bill, whereas the official face of the F. B. I., despite all its sophisticated resources and technology, goes to the wrong address, and only arrives at the right address when it is all over.
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