Big news today as I’m exclusively able to unveil the
cover to my next Lucy Clayburn novel, STOLEN.
Here it is, alongside. Hope you approve. It’s certainly
eye-catching, I’m sure you’ll agree.
I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but
in addition this week, I thought it would be interesting to take a trip down
memory lane and check out 10 of the worst serial killers in distant history –
you know, that long-ago period of time when serial killers weren’t supposed to
exist? I’m hoping you’ll find that section of today’s blog informative if not exactly fun. And
in keeping with that subject, this week’s book review is an intriguing one indeed.
I’ll be focussing on THE WEREWOLF OF BAMBERG by German
author, Oliver Potzsch. Despite sounding like a horror novel, this is actually
an intense period crime-thriller. As always, you’ll find that detailed review
towards the lower end of today’s blogpost. You can jump straight down to it if
you wish, or alternatively you can hang around for those other things I
promised to mention.
STOLEN, the third outing in the Lucy Clayburn series, due
for publication on May 16, takes my young Manchester policewoman into slightly different territory from the norm.
In STRANGERS, she went undercover as a
prostitute to try an apprehend a streetwalker who was sexually murdering her
male clients, and in SHADOWS she was a part of the team pursuing the so-called Red
Headed League, a gang of ultra-violent armed robbers who were preying on the city’s gangsters.In STOLEN, it’s different again, Lucy getting involved in a baffling and distressing case when a bunch of OAPs and vagrants start dropping out of sight one by one. Again, it feels as if a killer is on the loose, but the eventual truth will be infinitely more terrifying even than that.
For fans of the Lucy Clayburn series, I can assure you
there will be much of the usual: genuine Brit-Grit as she wends her way around
the trash-strewn Manchester backstreets, dealing with lowlifes of every sort,
clashing constantly and ever more aggressively with the city’s contingent of
career criminals, and at the same time, though she rides a Ducati motorbike and
mingles with toughs, using brain rather than brawn in her efforts to solve a
perplexing mystery.
I think I can safely add that there are one or two
traditional(ish) horror elements in this book too. It’s NOT a horror novel, of
course – it’s firmly a crime-thriller. But one subtext we’ll be looking at is
the way evil, if it goes unchecked, can cascade down the ages and through the
generations like a virus. We’ve also got some very gruesome deaths – some of
the worst I’ve ever committed to paper, I think – and a few decayed,
post-industrial settings that wouldn’t be out of place in the dark neo-Gothic
world of the Universal Frankenstein films of the 1930s.
Okay, that’s enough for now. As I say, STOLEN can be
purchased from May 16 from all the usual outlets, but it’s available for
pre-order right now.
And now that other little thing I was talking about …
Slaying since time immemorial
There is a popular misconception that serial killers only
commenced their war against mankind from the late 19th century, from roughly around
the time of Jack the Ripper, whereas during all the ages before then we’d been
spared this bizarre and terrible form of deviancy.
Unfortunately, the truth is grimmer.
Jack the Ripper, though he laid down a bloodstained
template, wasn’t even London’s first serial killer, let alone the world’s. All
the way back through the 19th century and into the 18th, the annals of crime
repeatedly report the escapades of criminals who killed, raped and tortured
repeatedly. But at a time when policing was sparse and disorganised, and
communications across counties (never mind across whole countries) poor to
nonexistent, it’s perhaps no surprise that these terrifying stories did not
become the national cause célèbres that they are today. And that is even more
the case if you delve deeper into antiquity.
Many of them, of course, are what we would classify today
as despots:
The likes of Nero (37-68 AD), Caligula (12-41 AD), Commodus
(161-192 AD) and Caracalla (188-217 AD), perhaps the four most notoriously
unhinged Roman emperors, or all-conquering, all-slaughtering warlords like
Attila (406-453 AD) and Ghengis Khan (1162-1227), or rulers who simply defined
themselves by their casual but ruthless brutality: Vlad the Impaler
(1428-1477), Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), Bloody Mary of England (1515-1558).
The simple explanation behind these icons of evil could be that they are yet further examples of humanity’s folly when it comes to appointing leaders who are completely unsuited to the task – even in recent times it is clearly the case that people hold power who patently shouldn’t – while the rest of society got on swimmingly because they were all downtrodden together. But these warped individuals undoubtedly tick many of the serial killer boxes: rampant narcissism, sexual sadism, casual cruelty, consciences that were either inert or completely absent. And anyway, you don’t have to look very much farther into the lower orders of these same time-periods to discover that there were other heinous villains on the loose too, and this lot you might have missed at first glance because they were humbler creatures and therefore not as newsworthy (especially in an age when there was no news-wire at all).
The likes of Nero (37-68 AD), Caligula (12-41 AD), Commodus
(161-192 AD) and Caracalla (188-217 AD), perhaps the four most notoriously
unhinged Roman emperors, or all-conquering, all-slaughtering warlords like
Attila (406-453 AD) and Ghengis Khan (1162-1227), or rulers who simply defined
themselves by their casual but ruthless brutality: Vlad the Impaler
(1428-1477), Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584), Bloody Mary of England (1515-1558).The simple explanation behind these icons of evil could be that they are yet further examples of humanity’s folly when it comes to appointing leaders who are completely unsuited to the task – even in recent times it is clearly the case that people hold power who patently shouldn’t – while the rest of society got on swimmingly because they were all downtrodden together. But these warped individuals undoubtedly tick many of the serial killer boxes: rampant narcissism, sexual sadism, casual cruelty, consciences that were either inert or completely absent. And anyway, you don’t have to look very much farther into the lower orders of these same time-periods to discover that there were other heinous villains on the loose too, and this lot you might have missed at first glance because they were humbler creatures and therefore not as newsworthy (especially in an age when there was no news-wire at all).
At the end of the day, don’t worry about it. You won’t
have to go leafing through the dusty chronicles yourselves, because I’ve done
it for you. Today, as promised, I’m going to showcase 10 little-known cases of
serial murder from distant history.
Before I proceed there are one or two that most of us –
certainly those of us who are horror fans – will already be familiar with.
Gilles de Rais (1405-1440), Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614, pictured right, Hammer-style, aka Ingrid Pitt) and Sawney Bean (16th
century – if he existed at all!) are infamous the world over and would figure
in any list of mankind’s worst killers even by modern standards, so I’m
purposefully going to leave those three out.The focus today, in chronological order, is those human predators of ancient antiquity who remain largely unknown:
Locusta
A bit of a cheat in this first instance, as Locusta was an expert poisoner and professional assassin rather than a serial killer per se, but one can’t help wondering how she’d ever have acquired such a macabre skillset if she hadn’t been very interested (and experienced) in it from the outset. All we really know about her is that she came to Rome from Gaul in the early 50s AD, already an accomplished poisoner, and that she rapidly began hiring herself out to high-paying clients, carrying out an unspecified number of successful murders.
A bit of a cheat in this first instance, as Locusta was an expert poisoner and professional assassin rather than a serial killer per se, but one can’t help wondering how she’d ever have acquired such a macabre skillset if she hadn’t been very interested (and experienced) in it from the outset. All we really know about her is that she came to Rome from Gaul in the early 50s AD, already an accomplished poisoner, and that she rapidly began hiring herself out to high-paying clients, carrying out an unspecified number of successful murders.
Somehow detected and imprisoned, she saved herself by providing effectively destructive potions to some of the city’s more ruthless celebrities, such as Agrippina the Younger, and later on, her son, Emperor Nero, who was so impressed with the results that he pardoned her, paid her handsomely and appointed her head-tutor at a special school for poisoners. Locusta came unstuck when Nero committed suicide in 68 AD. She was arrested again by the Emperor Galba, who paraded her as a typical example of his forerunner’s amoral degeneracy, and this time was executed after first been led through the streets of Rome in chains and mocked and stoned by the populace.
Gilles GarnierClassic example of a serial killer whose depredations were so horrifying to the community he terrorised that it soon came to believe a monster was in its midst, specifically a werewolf. Known as the ‘Wolf of St Bonnot’, Garnier lived in Dole in the Franche-Comte Province of France in the 1570s. A married man, but already a reclusive outsider with a bad reputation, it might have been inevitable that Garnier would become a suspect when, in 1572, a series of murders of local village children began. But Garnier brought the full force of the law down on himself the following year when he was found in possession of one of the bodies.
The murders had been spectacularly gruesome, five infants strangled and then mutilated, meat torn from their bones presumably for the purpose of cannibalism. It perhaps isn’t difficult to see why a primitive rural community felt they were in the grip of a man-wolf, and when Garnier confessed as much, saying that a magical ointment had enabled his transformation, the case was deemed complete. He was duly convicted and burned at the stake. Historians now consider him an archetypal serial killer, probably driven to his crimes by a combination of lust and hunger.
Peter Niers
Whether Niers was guilty of all 544 of the brutal murders
he was eventually convicted for, it’s clear that he was involved in violent
crime as a profession, and that he relentlessly robbed and killed across a wide
area of southern Germany in the 1570s, one of a network of bandits plaguing
the remoter, more thickly forested regions.
He also seems to have been fairly
well-known. Other captured highwaymen named him as an accomplice in numerous
horrible offences, including the murder and rape of young women in darkened
backstreets as well as the more mundane murder-for-profit of travellers on
lonely roads. Niers himself, held in the late 1570s in Gersbach, confessed to
75 such slayings, but after escaping, even that massive body-count appears to
have grown exponentially, with pamphlets and ballads carrying tales that Niers
had now made a pact with the Devil, and as such, had become an evil sorcerer
who frequently sacrificed unborn babies that he’d cut from the wombs of their
still-living mothers. Such infamy was his ultimate undoing.
On his capture in
1581 (having been recognised in a bathhouse in Neumarkt), he was tortured, confessed, and later executed by being flayed, roasted, broken on the wheel and
quartered.
On his capture in
1581 (having been recognised in a bathhouse in Neumarkt), he was tortured, confessed, and later executed by being flayed, roasted, broken on the wheel and
quartered.
Christman Genipperteinga
Despite the casting of Peter Niers as a kind of 16th
century Public Enemy No. 1, another felon operating in much the same area at
much the same time, appears to have run up an even more incredible tally of
victims. German bandit, Christman Genipperteinga supposedly murdered 964 people
during a reign of terror lasting from 1568 until 1581.
On the face of it, this number appears to be so preposterous that it’s led some scholars to wonder whether Genipperteinga ever existed at all and to question if he’s in fact a composite of a number of violent criminals who were on the loose in southern Germany at the same time. That said, when there was almost no organised law-enforcement with which to combat widespread banditry, and in a land of extensive wilderness, it’s not impossible that such an individual could have prospered.
Genipperteinga mainly attacked travellers from a clifftop stronghold
in the Bernkastel-Kues district, but he also murdered accomplices, poisoning
them and dumping their corpses down mine shafts, and after kidnapping a young
girl, fathered six children by her, strangling them all. Finally arrested in
1581, he was broken on the wheel, and left lingering on the gibbet alive for
nine days.
On the face of it, this number appears to be so preposterous that it’s led some scholars to wonder whether Genipperteinga ever existed at all and to question if he’s in fact a composite of a number of violent criminals who were on the loose in southern Germany at the same time. That said, when there was almost no organised law-enforcement with which to combat widespread banditry, and in a land of extensive wilderness, it’s not impossible that such an individual could have prospered.
Genipperteinga mainly attacked travellers from a clifftop stronghold
in the Bernkastel-Kues district, but he also murdered accomplices, poisoning
them and dumping their corpses down mine shafts, and after kidnapping a young
girl, fathered six children by her, strangling them all. Finally arrested in
1581, he was broken on the wheel, and left lingering on the gibbet alive for
nine days.
Best known of this bunch of deviants, Peter Stumpp – more
famous as the ‘Werewolf of Bedbourg’ – was yet another German serial slayer of
the 16th century, but his particular case raises several questions. Why did so
many sadistic mass-killers infest Germany at this time? And just how credulous
were the local courts?
Stumpp was a farmer in the Bedbourg district of Cologne, whose crimes during the 1580s were so ghoulish that for years afterwards it was considered a certainty he’d been a werewolf. But did the local authorities really believe that, or were they just going along with mass hysteria so as not to look complacent?
One modern theory is that a succession of harsh winters prior to this had damaged crops, causing famine and lawlessness; that might have explained the preponderance of vicious criminals. In addition, the Electorate of Cologne was embroiled in sectarian warfare throughout the 1580s, meaning that heresies were rife and that atrocities often went unpunished, so the few offenders brought to trial had to be made examples of; declaring them werewolves and making them pay the ultimate horrendous price was a lesson that would have been lost on no one.
Stumpp certainly assisted with this. Arrested in 1589, he admitted to having killed and butchered 14 children (including his own son) and two women during a lifetime of devil-worship. He also claimed to have met Satan, who’d given him a wolf-belt that turned him into a beast.
In reward for his crimes, he was broken on the wheel and then burned in the same fire as two convicted accomplices, his wife and daughter.
Stumpp was a farmer in the Bedbourg district of Cologne, whose crimes during the 1580s were so ghoulish that for years afterwards it was considered a certainty he’d been a werewolf. But did the local authorities really believe that, or were they just going along with mass hysteria so as not to look complacent?
One modern theory is that a succession of harsh winters prior to this had damaged crops, causing famine and lawlessness; that might have explained the preponderance of vicious criminals. In addition, the Electorate of Cologne was embroiled in sectarian warfare throughout the 1580s, meaning that heresies were rife and that atrocities often went unpunished, so the few offenders brought to trial had to be made examples of; declaring them werewolves and making them pay the ultimate horrendous price was a lesson that would have been lost on no one.
Stumpp certainly assisted with this. Arrested in 1589, he admitted to having killed and butchered 14 children (including his own son) and two women during a lifetime of devil-worship. He also claimed to have met Satan, who’d given him a wolf-belt that turned him into a beast.
In reward for his crimes, he was broken on the wheel and then burned in the same fire as two convicted accomplices, his wife and daughter.
Björn Pétursson
Iceland’s only known serial killer to date, Björn
Pétursson’s life reads like a horror novel, and yet much of it is testified to in reliable court documents. The nastiness started early, his mother having
developed a craving for blood while pregnant with him, and his oddball father
agreeing to let her drink his.
After this, born into a bleak corner of the Icelandic interior in 1555, Pétursson led as conventional a peasant childhood as possible (despite showing some violent tendencies), but at the age of 15 had a bizarre dream in which a stranger told him to climb a local mountain, on top of which he’d locate the implement that would make his name. The next day, Pétursson climbed the peak and found the axe with which he would go on to kill his first victim, a neighbouring farm-boy chosen at random. Though it was only after he’d inherited a nearby croft that he gave full rein to his blood-lust, slaughtering all visitors and passers-by with the same trusty blade. In 1596, when a homeless woman escaped his clutches (after he’d already slain her three children), he was arrested.
The remnants of many corpses – one estimate is 18 – were found on the premises, and Pétursson was convicted and subsequently became another to die bloodily on the breaking-wheel.
After this, born into a bleak corner of the Icelandic interior in 1555, Pétursson led as conventional a peasant childhood as possible (despite showing some violent tendencies), but at the age of 15 had a bizarre dream in which a stranger told him to climb a local mountain, on top of which he’d locate the implement that would make his name. The next day, Pétursson climbed the peak and found the axe with which he would go on to kill his first victim, a neighbouring farm-boy chosen at random. Though it was only after he’d inherited a nearby croft that he gave full rein to his blood-lust, slaughtering all visitors and passers-by with the same trusty blade. In 1596, when a homeless woman escaped his clutches (after he’d already slain her three children), he was arrested.
The remnants of many corpses – one estimate is 18 – were found on the premises, and Pétursson was convicted and subsequently became another to die bloodily on the breaking-wheel.
Paris in the 17th century was a hotbed of crime and vice, much of
it interwoven with witchcraft, and one of the queens of this cesspit was
Catherine Montvoisin, aka ‘La Voisin’.
A key problem with the 21st century conviction that witchcraft trials were all nonsense and the alleged perpetrators invariably innocent is that it doesn’t allow for the widespread belief in witches at the time, which was one good reason why considerable numbers of cunning individuals behaved as if they were witches in order to make money. La Voisin was probably the best example we have, an habitual drunk but also the organiser of an all-female network of abortionists, midwives and fortune-tellers who slowly graduated to casting spells, holding Black Masses (involving draining blood from aborted foetuses, but sometimes from live babies too), and, to make it look as if their hexes worked, administering lethal substances (using such horrific methods as serving deadly elixirs and rubbing arsenic into syphilis sores).
Estimated to have killed almost 2,500 victims, La Voison was
arrested in 1679, when Louis XIV’s secret police moved in. Her belief that,
having worked for highly-placed Parisians, she’d be protected, came to nothing.
She was burned at the stake in 1680.
A key problem with the 21st century conviction that witchcraft trials were all nonsense and the alleged perpetrators invariably innocent is that it doesn’t allow for the widespread belief in witches at the time, which was one good reason why considerable numbers of cunning individuals behaved as if they were witches in order to make money. La Voisin was probably the best example we have, an habitual drunk but also the organiser of an all-female network of abortionists, midwives and fortune-tellers who slowly graduated to casting spells, holding Black Masses (involving draining blood from aborted foetuses, but sometimes from live babies too), and, to make it look as if their hexes worked, administering lethal substances (using such horrific methods as serving deadly elixirs and rubbing arsenic into syphilis sores).
Estimated to have killed almost 2,500 victims, La Voison was
arrested in 1679, when Louis XIV’s secret police moved in. Her belief that,
having worked for highly-placed Parisians, she’d be protected, came to nothing.
She was burned at the stake in 1680.
Beast of Gévaudan
A seminal case for all kinds of reasons, not least
because it established a couple of key tenets of werewolf lore, firstly that all the
best cases were to be found in France, and secondly that it would require silver bullets
to dispatch them. For our subject today - historical serial killers - the Beast
of Gévaudan isn’t as tenuously connected as some may think, because serial
murder is one of very few possible explanations for the mystery that occurred
there.
In short, between 1764 and 1767, a 90-kilometre region of south-central France was the scene of a murderous rampage, which claimed 113 deaths, some of the victims partially eaten, all with their throats torn.
It was a
made-to-measure werewolf case, except that this was the Age of Enlightenment,
and no one believed in werewolves anymore. Despite this, witnesses claimed to have seen
a wolf-like creature, and when the carnage ended, a hunter called Jean Chastel
having shot the beast with a silver bullet, the carcass was that of a large but
unknown species of wolf.
The Chastel incident is now dismissed by certain modern commentators, who have decided that no single wolf could have been responsible for such carnage and therefore suspect that an unknown human agency was attacking villagers with a trained animal (possibly a lion), a theory examined in detail in the 2001 movie, Brotherhood of the Wolf.
In short, between 1764 and 1767, a 90-kilometre region of south-central France was the scene of a murderous rampage, which claimed 113 deaths, some of the victims partially eaten, all with their throats torn.
The Chastel incident is now dismissed by certain modern commentators, who have decided that no single wolf could have been responsible for such carnage and therefore suspect that an unknown human agency was attacking villagers with a trained animal (possibly a lion), a theory examined in detail in the 2001 movie, Brotherhood of the Wolf.
Lewis Hutchinson
In another case that could easily become the subject of a Gothic horror film, Scottish immigrant Lewis Hutchinson arrived in Jamaica in
the 1760s, claiming to be a doctor, though his real past was unknown. The first
thing he did was purchase a ruined plantation house, which he restored and
named Edinburgh Castle.
Up to this point, he’d behaved legally, however suspicions soon grew that many of the cattle he started raising there were stolen. If that was his worst offence, he might have been tolerated, but then travellers started disappearing in the vicinity. Initially, no one knew that Hutchinson was using them for target practise, literally waylaying them with gun in hand and hunting them down like animals, killing them for sport. Afterwards, he would pocket whatever wealth they’d been carrying, and his slaves would butcher the corpses, disposing of the fragments in a nearby sinkhole.
The longer Hutchinson remained at liberty, the more reckless he became, murdering invited dinner guests and letting stories spread that he held obscene orgies at the Castle. But after shooting dead a British soldier who was trying to arrest him, he tried to flee Jamaica, only to be arrested by the Royal Navy, and hanged in 1773. Excavation of his estate later uncovered a total of 43 corpses.
Up to this point, he’d behaved legally, however suspicions soon grew that many of the cattle he started raising there were stolen. If that was his worst offence, he might have been tolerated, but then travellers started disappearing in the vicinity. Initially, no one knew that Hutchinson was using them for target practise, literally waylaying them with gun in hand and hunting them down like animals, killing them for sport. Afterwards, he would pocket whatever wealth they’d been carrying, and his slaves would butcher the corpses, disposing of the fragments in a nearby sinkhole.
The longer Hutchinson remained at liberty, the more reckless he became, murdering invited dinner guests and letting stories spread that he held obscene orgies at the Castle. But after shooting dead a British soldier who was trying to arrest him, he tried to flee Jamaica, only to be arrested by the Royal Navy, and hanged in 1773. Excavation of his estate later uncovered a total of 43 corpses.
Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova
In times gone by, the easiest way for a sadistic murderer
to act out his/her violent fantasies and yet limit the chances of lawful retribution was for
the victims to be selected from the lower classes, especially if they were
indentured to the killer as servants or slaves.
Obviously, this confined said advantage to the controlling hierarchy, but even then there are a remarkable number of cases that did come to court, and in several of them the perpetrator was female.
We’ve already spoken about Elizabeth Bathory (650 victims). We could just as easily discuss Countess Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer in 17th century Chile (40 victims), and Delphine LaLaurie in New Orleans in the late 18th century (tally unknown).
It’s still the case that more male landowners were likely responsible for these kinds of crimes than female, but the female cases tended to shock more, certainly at the time, which might explain their lasting infamy. One lesser-known example was that of wealthy Moscow socialite Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, who in 1762 was arrested for personally whipping to death 138 of her female servants. Her aristocratic status had protected her up until the accession of Catherine the Great, but the new tsarina acted swiftly because she wanted to make visible concessions to the serfs.
Even then, Saltykova was spared the noose, and imprisoned in an underground dungeon, where she died in 1801.
Obviously, this confined said advantage to the controlling hierarchy, but even then there are a remarkable number of cases that did come to court, and in several of them the perpetrator was female.
We’ve already spoken about Elizabeth Bathory (650 victims). We could just as easily discuss Countess Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer in 17th century Chile (40 victims), and Delphine LaLaurie in New Orleans in the late 18th century (tally unknown).
It’s still the case that more male landowners were likely responsible for these kinds of crimes than female, but the female cases tended to shock more, certainly at the time, which might explain their lasting infamy. One lesser-known example was that of wealthy Moscow socialite Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova, who in 1762 was arrested for personally whipping to death 138 of her female servants. Her aristocratic status had protected her up until the accession of Catherine the Great, but the new tsarina acted swiftly because she wanted to make visible concessions to the serfs.
Even then, Saltykova was spared the noose, and imprisoned in an underground dungeon, where she died in 1801.
***
At times like this, I can’t help wondering if many of our most monstrous myths derive from the murderous activities of demented human beings like these.
We can see here that in an age before the science of psychology and the study of mental illness, when there was no real comprehension of aberrant sexual desire particularly if it was mingled with violence, a non-human explanation was regularly leaped upon. Modern-day forensic profilers have even identified weird sexual elements in the activities of prolific poisoners despite their having next to no physical contact with their victims. But though poisoning was better understood in the old world than lust-murder – mainly because it was the chief means by which the low could bring down the high – to poison someone was still held to be so wicked that once again concerns about witchcraft and devilry often went hand-in-hand with it.
But just consider the vast numbers of myths our ancestors
lived in fear of, wherein terrifying, unstoppable predators lurked just beyond
the edges of human society.It’s not just werewolves, but vampires, ogres, trolls. In the poem Beowulf, Grendel (left) was a blueprint serial killer. In Jack the Giant Killer, Cormoran raided Cornish farming communities, taking lives and livestock at will. What about the Ango-Saxon ‘sceaudagenga’ (or shadow-man), who lurked deep in the forest, and if you met him, you’d never be coming home?
Even foul figures of of classical mythology, like the Minotaur and
Medusa (left), possessed recognisably human characteristics, despite the horrors they
wreaked. When you think how many monsters of this type were believed to inhabit
the fringes of the Ancient World, to the terror of isolated, ignorant communities,
you can’t help wondering if, in truth, an exceptional number of serial killers
were hard at work.
Perhaps the only difference between then and now is that
these days we can put names and faces to the monsters – eventually. Not that it makes
us any the less afraid of them.
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime,
thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and
enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly
be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the
definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in
more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly
enjoyed … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces
of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will
not be your thing.
Outline
It’s the 1660s, and Schongau hangman, Jakob Kuisl, and
his family arrive at the forest-begirt town of Bamberg, Bavaria, to celebrate
the wedding of his estranged brother (and local hangman), Bartholomaus. A happy
event is in prospect, Jakob’s beautiful and spirited daughter, Magdalena,
hoping that her father and uncle will at last make friends and put behind them
the mysterious event that split their family apart during their youth.
But all is not well in Bamberg. A series of ghastly
murders is in progress, the unknown assailant horribly mangling the victims and
scattering their dismembered body-parts. It hasn’t taken long for rumours to
spread that a werewolf is on the prowl, though Jakob and Magdalena – a
father-and-daughter crime-fighting team (there have been four ‘Hangman’s
Daughter’ books before this one) – come to dispute this, noting that most of the
gory fragments were severed from the original bodies cleanly rather than torn
with tooth and claw.
A werewolf with a blade? It seems unlikely.
Even more suspiciously, some of the victims, the vast
majority of whom are drawn from the town’s patrician class, show marks of the
rack and branding-iron.
A werewolf who abducts and tortures his victims before
tearing them apart? It seems even more unlikely.
But Bamberg is not a town where rhyme and reason exist in
abundance. Still haunted by the events of forty years earlier, when a
far-reaching witch trial saw hundreds of citizens, most of them innocent,
tortured and then burned at the stake, fear and superstition are rife in the
flea-infested hovels and narrow, stone-arched streets. The townsfolk aren’t
even sure what form their adversary takes: is it a man/wolf hybrid, a warlock
who can turn himself into an actual wolf; or a maniac wearing a pelt? –
whichever the case, they are certain it’s a creature of the Devil, and that it
must be destroyed, along with all its spawn.
Jakob undertakes to investigate the crimes, aided very
efficiently by Magdalena, her educated husband, Simon, and his close friend and
local physician, Master Samuel. But the situation worsens when Sebastian
Harsee, suffragan bishop of Bamberg, sees advantage in stirring up these fears
because if terror of the darkness brings the townsfolk closer to God, it can
only empower his own position. Further complications then arise when a
dangerous hunting dog gets loose outside the city (and this predator does leave
his victims mauled and ripped), by an outbreak of rabies (an illness
misunderstand by the medical science of the time, and the sufferers of which
snarl and froth at the mouth), and by the escape from the prince-bishop’s
menagerie of a baboon (a completely alien creature to most Germans of this
era).
As the attacks continue, hysteria increases, and
accusations fly everywhere. Meanwhile, Jakob and Magdalena find themselves with
many suspects to consider. The hideously scarred Jeremias, custodian of a local
tavern, is a friendly enough soul, so much so that Magdalena will happily leave
her two children in his care, but increasingly, it seems, he has odd and
ghoulish interests, and his past is another one that is shrouded in mystery. Aloysius,
a solitary individual, both looks and smells like the hunting dogs he tends; he
is an odious individual, whom Jakob instinctively dislikes. Then there is
Bartholomaus, Jakob’s own brother. The deep enmity between these two partly
stems from the fact that, when they were boys, Jakob never wanted to follow
their father into the hangman trade, while Bartholomaus, a keen student of the
most brutal forms of punishment, positively looked forward to it.
The case finally turns deadly for the Kuisl family themselves,
when Barbara, Magdalena’s younger sister, falls for handsome young actor,
Matheo, who is part of a travelling troupe visiting the town, only to see him
clapped in irons as a suspect. In this case, the evidence is actually rather
good. Items associated with black magic are found among the actors’
possessions, along with a number of wolf-skins. Also suspected, Barbara goes
into hiding in company with the troupe’s depressed resident-writer, Markus
Salter – as much from the baying mobs rampant in the city as from the actual
authorities – but it’s clearly only a matter of time before she’ll be found. If
Jakob wants to save his daughter from a terrible death, he knows he must crack
the case very quickly indeed …
Review
I’d never encountered the Hangman’s Daughter stories
before, so it probably wasn’t ideal to come in at volume five. It didn’t spoil
my enjoyment of The Werewolf of Bamberg, but I must say – this is one of the
strangest novels I’ve ever read.
First of all, it’s an excellent recreation of a turbulent
age, a time when the brutality and mysticism of the Middle Ages is slowly and
reluctantly giving way to the Enlightenment, but an era when Western Europe is
still the epitome of the Third World. Real skills of any sort, unless they are
connected to violence and death, are in short supply. Education is thin on the
ground. Personal wealth is something to be defended at all costs, but life in
general is cheap. Most crimes, even petty ones, are punishable by death or at
least a severe whipping. Trials might hinge on the reputation of the accused
rather than factual evidence. Some occupations are held to be vastly less
honourable than others, including, amazingly, the medical profession. Despite
it being an age of faith, basic moralities are skewed, community leaders,
including senior churchmen, setting a very poor example with their many and
varied vices.
This attention to authentic historical detail is
fascinating, invoking a different and distinctly non-chocolate box picture of
the near-distant past. I was utterly absorbed in it – much more so, sadly, than
I was by the actual mystery.
Oliver Potzsch does an impressive job of setting up a
whole range of suspects, while the essential back-story – a political stitch-up
of epic proportions – is effectively drizzled through the narrative rather than
thrown at us in one lump of exposition, but the pace at times is wearisome.
This may partly be down to losses in translation, though I’m not sure it is.
Lee Chadeayne does a sterling job of bringing The Werewolf of Bamberg from
German to English, leaving us with a very readable text, but there is an awful
lot of repetition here, and that must be part of the original writing. I soon
got tired of seeing Jakob and Bartholomaus quarrelling over nothing or hearing
that the occupation of executioner is badly thought-of (and why would that
surprise or outrage anyone?). As such, the novel overall is perhaps twice as
long as it needs to be.
In addition, it’s a personal belief of mine that too many
characters can get in the way. Jakob and Magdalena are the stars of the book,
or they would be if their contributions weren’t obscured by what amounts to an
ensemble cast, all of whom jockey for prominence; in fact, so many are the
named personages in this book that at times it’s a real challenge keeping up
with everyone and remembering what they are doing.
My other main complaint is about Jakob Kuisl himself. I
like him as a character – a gruff, middle-aged man who doesn’t look after
himself is a rare delight in hero terms – but find it difficult buying into the
conceit that, though he’s a long-serving hangman, he feels sorrow for his
victims and often acts to reduce their pain. Wouldn’t he get sacked for doing
that, or maybe worse? What’s more, when this approach fails, he consoles
himself with the knowledge that he’s merely a cog in an unjust machine and that
it’s never his personal fault. All very well, but when you consider that his
duty has seen him not just string felons to the gallows, but burn them at the
stake, break them on the wheel and draw and quarter them between teams of
horses, his oft-expressed disgust at those other executioners, his brother for
example, who are consciously vicious, rings a bit hollow to modern ears.
But all that said, I stuck with it to the end. So, while
I wouldn’t call The Werewolf of Bamberg a real page-turner, its atmosphere and
tone did more than catch my interest. In addition to the historical angle, I’ve
long been a sucker for werewolf stories, and even though it becomes apparent
early on that we’re not dealing with a werewolf here, but a serial killer, it is clearly based on the real-life mystery of the Werewolf of Bedburg, and we
still find ourselves on dark, winding streets with a horrific menace stalking
us through the shadows. In that regard, it’s as effective a horror story as it
is a thriller and having a foot in both these camps is not always a bad thing.
I recommend it to all dark fiction fans, but at more than
600 pages you’ll need plenty time in which to read it.
As usual – purely for the fun of it – here are my picks
for who should play the leads if The Werewolf of Bamberg is ever adapted for
English-language film or TV (but I still think the main concept would be a
tough sell for a modern audience):
Jakob Kuisl – Liam Neeson
Magdalena Fronwieser – Cosma Shiva Hagen
Bartholomaus Kuisl – Danny Webb
Simon Fronwieser – Martin Freeman
Master Samuel – Oded Fehr
Jeremias – Rutger Hauer
Sebastian Harsee – Gary Oldman
Markus Salter – Iwan Rheon
(We’ve used a lot of pictures today, including several original, rather grotesque woodcuts, but also a magnificent shot of Inner Iceland by Albert Dros, and a startling werewolf pic which I found floating around online and will be happy to give a credit for if anyone knows who the creator is. The same applies for the image of Medusa, while the image-grab of Grendel comes from the 2007 movie, Beowulf).
(We’ve used a lot of pictures today, including several original, rather grotesque woodcuts, but also a magnificent shot of Inner Iceland by Albert Dros, and a startling werewolf pic which I found floating around online and will be happy to give a credit for if anyone knows who the creator is. The same applies for the image of Medusa, while the image-grab of Grendel comes from the 2007 movie, Beowulf).