The friends on whom I pressed Helen Garner’s This House of Grief – an astonishing account of the trial in Australia of a man who drowned his three children by driving his car off a bridge – have begun reporting back now, and once they’ve told me how much they loved it, they all say the same thing, which is: I wouldn’t mind reading more books like that. Hmm. Unfortunately, most bookshops do not come with a section marked: “Super Classy True Crime”. Rummage around, and you’ll find a ton of books about the Krays and Jack the Ripper, plus, if you’re lucky, a copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
Here, then, are a couple of recommendations. The first is Handsome Brute, Sean O’Connor’s 2013 investigation of the life and crimes of Neville Heath, a notorious charmer (of sorts) who was hanged for the brutal murder of two women in 1946. O’Connor had access to previously restricted Home Office and Metropolitan police files, so this is a fairly definitive account of Heath’s gruesome activities. But it’s also a masterful study both of Britain in the 40s, and of the particular kind of masculinity – men were required to wear it like a mask – then abroad.
The second, more obscure, is Darcy O’Brien’s Murder in Little Egypt, a book much admired by, among others, Seamus Heaney (it was published in 1989). O’Brien is best known for his roman à clef, A Way of Life, Like Any Other, which depicts his Hollywood childhood, and is one of my favourite novels ever.
But he also wrote a book about the Hillside Stranglers, Two of a Kind, and this one, which tells the story of Dr John Dale Cavaness, an Illinois doctor who killed his 22-year-old son, Sean, in 1984. Again, this is a highly detailed account of a murder trial. But it’s also a meticulous examination of the gothic underbelly of rural America: isolated, butch and frequently seeped in blood.
