Emlyn Williams (1) (1905–1987)

Vivid telling of appalling tale, the Moors Murderers from the grim early (pre-Swinging) Sixties.
Does succeed in giving a sense of who they were and what motivated them. Overdoes the 'explaining' a little, but still their sickening ego trip is exposed. Still shocks. But feels so distant. Yet (amazingly) Brady, the crucial agent of these faded distant horrors, so banal yet seeming now more legend than reality, still exists a half-century on.... Hindley, happily, unhappily, is gone.

This is one of those books I reread every few years with as much pleasure as the first time I read it thirty years ago. Williams, the child of a Welsh mining family, was lucky in his parents and his mentors and went on to become a well known playwright and actor. He was so in touch with his childhood and early manhood, and displayed such wisdom, humor, and affection in writing about them. A favorite book.

Hm. I started with misunderstandings. The protagonist is not a woman. The author is not a woman. The humor is extremely restrained. This is mostly a very well imagined adventure of a commoner being thrust into the royal responsibilities in Buckinham Palace. The setting timewise is perplexing. On the one hand it jives with my reading of Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, lots of men out of work and 'tramping' in the 1930s. But there is hardly any acknowledgment of the coming European show more threat. I'm perplexed as King George III would say. show less

The Moors Murders are the most brutal, senseless and cold blooded killings to have occurred in Great Britain in many years. Between November 1963 and October 1965, Ian Brady, clerk, and Myra Hindley, typist, killed at least three—and possibly as many as five—young people varying in age from ten to seventeen, for no apparent motive. On May 6, 1966 the two murderers were sentenced to life imprisonment (capital punishment has been abolished in England). Beyond Belief, an uncanny feat of show more re-creation of the minds, hearts, and motivations of the two killers, is the story of this case. In it Emlyn Williams has achieved superbly his objective: “The dual accuracy of history and of imaginative understanding.

The way this book was written was very annoying to me at first.
English is not my mothers’ tongue, well it is, she is English, :-) but I was raised speaking Dutch only)

here is an example (The author must have fabricated all the dialogues between Ian and Myra.)
Ian: and if were caught which will not happen, ye must imagine yerself in an airport wi’ your luggage searched, it’s full of contra band, well ye,re just to sayye dinna ken a thing aboot it. I’ll teach ye a code,what a superbb evenin.

And this go’s on continually.
Besides that I did find it interesting because I did not know anything about the Moors Murderers and the author does provide some interesting information.
8.5
read on March 25th 2007 show less