Crime Classics: The Moors and The Wests

I’ve been a little quiet preparing a new series for you. After the recent demise of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, a man who terrorised most of northern England for most of the 1970s and was caught only be sheer fluke, I decided to look back.

I have found that a writer, perhaps better known for his novels, if he is known at all these days, Gordon Burn, was fascinated by the Moors Murders. He was an impressionable teenager when Hindley and Brady were doing their worst in the 1960s. I was an impressionable teenager when Peter Topping’s team found Pauline Reade’s body on the moors in 1987. And I remain fascinated by those moors, so close to my childhood home, and even closer to my university lodgings. Keith Bennett, the lost boy, lived just a few hundred metres from my flat in Longsight. As did Ian Brady.

It turns out that Burn’s fascination with those child murders led him to write about Sutcliffe, gaining himself a reputation in true crime for his willingness to walk in the shoes, and in the same streets, as the killer and his victims. Later, he wrote about the Wests.

So I have obtained Gordon Burn’s book about the Wests, and also a couple of classics about those moors: one by Jean Ritchie and the original work of its time by Emlyn Williams. Williams really was a writer of his time: the introduction alone brims with the most appalling sexist tropes imaginable. It wouldn’t see the light of day again, thank goodness.

But these books benefit from being written at, or at least closer to, the times of the crimes. They are not quite eye-witness accounts, but they are close. Carol Ann Lee’s book about Hindley remains the best thing ever written about Britain’s most notorious female serial killer. But Ritchie came first, and she (being a she) got closer to Hindley than anyone else, even if she got some things wrong.

So buckle up for a stroll down memory lane. Perhaps some of the darkest lanes in the modern history of these islands.

Source

The TLS: www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/hunting-the-yorkshire-ripper-gordon-burn