Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn

cw: murder, abuse, sexual assault, incest etc (it’s a blog about a book about serial killers/abusers fyi)

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Fuck

Like, fuck.

Fucking hell.

Fuck.

Yeah. Fuck.

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For work last week, I had to enter middle England. That’s right, I was forced to travel over an hour or so from Central London into that alien, terrifying, culture riddled with cruelty, bigotry, and blood. Shudder.

I was being paid to be there – don’t worry, I was not there by choice or for free! – dealing for four days with a particularly draining professional engagement. (Yes, even though in any just capitalistic society (teehee) it should, TriumphOfTheNow.com doesn’t keep me in dog food, paperbacks, synthesisers and the ever-rarer bottle of wine, so I am shamefully compelled to exchange my time and labour on the open market boooo (donate a four-plus figure sum via this link to change that for!)).

Knowing I would have a terrible time in middle England due to the place and the circumstances, I picked up a book from my shelf to take with me that would perfectly match the vibes from that week: Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn.

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Happy Like Murderers is a British true crime classic, much like Helter Skelter is in the US. But – and I think this sums up the fundamental aesthetic differences between the two – while that book explores cults, movie stars, rock stars and the blistering California heat, here in dreadful England (I say “here”, but I’m typing this in windswept, rainy, Santander, which I have run away to for two nights, desperate for a change) we get incest, extreme sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, coercion, enforced prostitution of children, dismemberment, fucking disgusting sadistic cruelty, all packaged up alongside smalltime suburbia, love of DIY, “some of my best friends are-” type racism, a Protestant work ethic, amateur pornography, cowboy builders, houseproud homeowners, failure to engage with building regulations, sex shops, pubs, petty larceny, the loss of traditional farming communities, gentrification, council planning, high water tables, the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy and – perhaps the two things most associated with Wests in the mind of very repressed England – kink and non-monogamy.

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I have seen Fred and Rose West described as “sex positive kink pioneers”, and in Burn’s book he goes into great detail about not only the violent sexual abuse they perpetrated – together – against their own children and the young women and girls they intentionally kidnapped, tortured and murdered (most of whose bodies were found (when they were eventually disinterred from under the Wests’ patio almost twenty years after they got bored of doing that regularly) with remnants of the improvised masks and bonds still attached to their sawn and torn apart body parts), but also the whips, domination, submission, bondage etc sexual activities they used to get up to with each other alone, with each other with men and women they met through classified ads and the nightspots of their local area, and – most frequently according to Burn – with men that Fred set Rose up with, sometimds exchanging sex for rent or other material or practical favours, sometimes just for fun and sometimes – later – on a solidly professional basis for many years.

I mean, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. If you want to know about the Wests you’ll probably read Happy Like Murderers yourself at some point, or listen to a True Crime podcast or watch some kind of dramatisation of it (which I’m sure exists), or you’ll watch the new Black Mirror episode very much based on the Wests (spoiler alert lol). On that, it’s the only episode of that season I’ve seen and I only watched it because I mentioned to a friend I was reading this book and they suggested I should, as it both borrows from the same source and also draws attention to the ethical questions that arise from production of true crime media, which is something that Happy Like Murderers – published in 1998 with the participation of many surviving members of the West family and access to lots of Fred West’s prison writings – fails to do in a pretty striking way, especially given that this is “literary” true crime, that it is “artful” true crime that is published by Faber and features cover artwork by Damien Hirst and references proper like literary types in the Acknowledgements and also uses pretty literary constructions in the text, including things like intentional, near-soporific repetition, detached timelines, dropped threads, asides, digression, distraction and sometimes almost poetically creative use of non-standard sentence structure…

This is meant to be literary rather than salacious, but it doesn’t really ever quite escape the trap of screaming the three pillars of the Fred & Rose mythology: these people loved sex, these people loved violence, and these people loved each other

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In hindsight, one of the most offensive things anyone has ever said to me was that time (and I’ve written about it before – though please note the factual error in that poem, the “Cunt” sign was made of iron not neon) when one of the many people I used to socialise with but haven’t really spoken to for most of a decade even though we never “fell out”, said that our mutual friends would “end up like Fred & Rose West” as a near-inevitability of practising non-monogamy. Obviously, that person was being shocking on purpose and almost certainly didn’t literally mean it, but I don’t think I’d really registered how inappropriate a thing to say that was at the time. Maybe I didn’t, really, until I read this, and realised that it wasn’t just a few sex murders that these people did, but full lifetimes of abuse and cruelty, both of them having been raised in deeply abusive and cruel environments that they actively began to replicate on younger siblings as soon as they could…

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I think that those comments speak to a particularly English repression, which, really, is the same kind of repression the Wests exploited in order to lure and abuse more people into their world, into their jointly eroticised sex games. And, yes, the people they tortured and killed were much less willing participants than the men who were paying to fuck Rose West for several years into my own lifetime, but – certainly the way Gordon Burn writes about their sex life here – the sex that happened with other people was also still sex that kinda happened within their unit of two… Burn draws attention to the cameras, the microphones, the surveillance equipment, the holes in walls and doors, used to record, photograph and distribute evidence of these encounters, as well as to the soiled underwear kept behind and even – though this is only discussed briefly – Fred West’s love of extracting and mixing and storing the cum of other men from his wife’s vagina.

Because although a lot of nonconsensual sexual abuse (and murder!) did happen, a lot of the sex that was had between the Wests and other people was enjoyed by all parties… The other people were very much into it and repeatedly returned to the Wests’ residence, and the details of their encounters – and the bodies of the participants – were all kept written down in graphic detail in racially-segregated notebooks kept by the Wests.

So eurgh yes.

It’s obviously fucking offensive to say that anyone who enjoys multiple types of sex with multiple partners is on a road towards murder and violence, just as it’s offensive to say that anyone into kink will eventually stop “playing” and start really doing harm…

The Wests continue to hold a central point in the British sexual imagination because there aren’t many other people who have publicly acknowledged an interest and experience in these matters without being shamed for it – and the Wests aberrant desires are often all bundled together – the shagging feeds the killing and the murders feed the sex…

When all sex is taboo, it is harder to talk about abuse… When all non-conformist sexual experiences are seen as unacceptable or deserving of shame (or mockery?), then it is easier for dangerous (I think that’s the word I mean) desires to develop; when moral absolutes are created and normalised, transgressing those becomes something one hides, and hidden things, things kept out of the light, tend to get grouped together…

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There’s a Bible passage I quote a lot and it’s because I think it’s a very significant piece of writing that sums up the problems and the dangers of extreme sexual repression – Matthew 5:28:

But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh
on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart.

This means that it is Christian doctrine to consider thinking of doing something as of the same moral weight as doing it, whatever that thing is.

It’s obviously a ridiculous way to engage with the world; purity of thought is impossible and purity of action may be easier than purity of thought but constant denial of desires and self obviously impacts the mind… This is what repression does and is and why it is dangerous: it draws hard lines where none should exist, and it draws them in a manner that is dangerous for the wider world.

When “taboo” includes the violent cruel horrors that the West perpetrated as well as the consensual fetish play they also partook in, that is a dangerous state: that puts people and society at risk…

I don’t know, it’s strange to come away from reading a book about violent crime with a “moral” that I don’t think was intended by the text (as well as a couple of nights of absolutely fucking harrowing violent dreams of cellars and cement and patios and dismemberment), but it’s also strange how clear this reading feels for me…

Fred and Rose West did not exist in a vacuum, did not spring up from a devilish shared hell to rain horror on the South West, no.

They were a symptom of a dangerous and very-much-extant English sensibility… One that teaches silence about pain, excessive resilience, one that encourages not talking and not grassing and not safe-guarding others. One that teaches “if I lived thru it so can they” as an acceptable attitude, one that doesn’t want to make things better for other people, one that doesn’t value openness, kindness, compassion and consideration, one that doesn’t try to help people in the community, rather walks away when it seems there might be trouble…

Obviously, I’m biased, I fucking abhor England, and I’m likely doing here what I’m accusing others of doing: combining things I deem to be unacceptable and drawing a firm connection that many would argue doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. The violence as a result of repression, both as societal ills, both as…

I dunno…

Happy Like Murderers is a well-constructed, genuinely harrowing text about some really fucking awful things. Maybe it isn’t a “state of the nation” text. But maybe it is.

Maybe it fucking is.

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the pleasure of regret is scott manley hadley’s experimental memoir about growing up in conservative england and is available from Broken Sleep Books.