Gentleman Jack and Serial Killing

Gentleman Jack was published on 15th October.  It is the seventh DI Yates novel and the first about a serial killer.

It wouldn’t be true to say that none of my other novels contains multiple murders – in most of them there are at least two murders.  Fair of Face, the last in the Yates series before Gentleman Jack, has a sub-plot in which the murders of five members of the same family take place in a single evening at an isolated farmhouse. 

According to criminologists, the technical term for multiple murders carried out on the same occasion like this is ‘spree killing’, not ‘serial killing’.  Serial killers, as the name suggests, commit their murders at intervals.  Typically, the time that elapses between each murder gets shorter.  Psychologists have several theories about why this should be.  They say it may be because the murderer subconsciously wants to get caught and therefore takes more risks each time he or she kills, including killing again while the police are still on major alert; it may be that the ’high’ he or she experiences from killing, like a drug, doesn’t last as long after several murders have been committed and therefore yet another slaying is needed to recapture it; it may be that the murderer ‘gets off’ on the notoriety that the crimes bring, rather than relishing the crimes themselves. 

I find all these arguments persuasive; I suspect that some serial killers are motivated by all of these things.  Those who think that such murderers are fame-seekers suggest this as a reason for the escalation of serial killing from the end of the nineteenth century, when mass media became accessible to most people.  They also say that it explains the sharp increase in serial killing after the Second World War, when the advent of television enabled lurid and graphic images of murderers and their victims to be broadcast.

 

Personally, I’ve never really been convinced by this: I think it could equally be the case that the police are better at identifying which crimes have been conducted by a serial killer and have more sophisticated techniques for catching all killers whatever their stripe, than in the past.  The Holmes computer system, developed after the shortcomings of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, has been one such very significant tool. However, the claim that since the beginning of the twenty-first century there have been approximately 250 serial killers operating in the USA alone at any one time is a sobering thought!

Some crime writers usually or even always write about serial killers; and some have been phenomenally successful.  I’m thinking of Henning Mankell, Thomas Harris, Jo Nesbo and Stieg Larson, all authors whose novels I admire.  Each of them approaches the topic of the serial killer in a different way; and, excluding Mankell, all of them in a more bloody and sensational way than would suit my style of writing.

That was one reason why I didn’t write about serial killing until my seventh novel: how to escape the gore? Another related to the question of motive – or the lack of it.  Thirdly, owing partly to the fact that I was a young woman living in Yorkshire during the height of the Yorkshire Ripper tyranny, I perhaps have a heightened awareness of the duty of the author to the reader when writing about serial killers. I feel that, much more than when writing fiction about other types of murder, someone writing about serial killers has a moral responsibility to fulfil.  It all hinges that knotty question of motive.  Most ‘rational’ murders have an identifiable motive. 

They can even be categorised: they are usually prompted by fear; hatred; or greed. 

I’ve speculated on what the serial killer’s motive might be, but true knowledge of what prompts his or her actions exists only in the killer’s own mind.  What’s even more difficult, the moral and fictional point of view, is that often real serial killers are not very interesting.  Like Sutcliffe, they tend to be neither destitute nor affluent.  They tend to have ordinary jobs rather than being unemployed, often jobs that provide them with transport and do not tie them to particular routines - Sutcliffe and Robert Black were both lorry drivers; Christopher Halliwell was a taxi driver.  Their statements to the police, if released to the public, are mundane, unimaginative and astonishingly coarse in the true sense of the word: they show little knowledge of their own viciousness; often, no remorse. 

This is unpromising material for a fiction writer, unless one interested in writing a police procedural novel, when the account of the chase is more important than the characters.  For authors like myself who are more interested in the psychological aspects of crime, the serial killer must have an inner life, something that speaks to him or her as a human being, something more complex than that deviant, primeval urge to kill. 

Some very distinguished authors have found ways of creating such an inner life.  Among them, Thomas Harris – the creator of Hannibal Lecter, the killer who kills as if he’s playing a game of chess – perhaps stands out. 

I thought about how I might tackle this conundrum, and put my own stamp on it, for a very long time before I wrote Gentleman Jack.  I hope you will like the book that is the result.

Gentleman Jack by Christina James is published by Salt Publishing

DI Tim Yates and DS Juliet Armstrong of South Lincolnshire Police are investigating a spate of thefts of expensive farm machinery and keep on drawing a blank. Meanwhile, local business man and philanthropist Jack Fovargue is assaulted in Spalding but when Yates visits him in his isolated farmhouse, Silverdale House, in Baston Fen, Fovargue seems reluctant to help the police find his assailant.  But when a body is found floating in the Fossdyke Canal, Yates and Armstrong suddenly find themselves working on a murder case. Shortly after that a second and third body are found in the same place. Is this the work of a single serial killer – or multiple killers?  And why does the investigation into the vehicle theftsand the murders keep taking Yates and Armstrong back to Jack Fovargue and Silverdale House?  In what Yates describes as “the most complicated case I’ve ever worked on,” his team face a series of apparently impenetrable conundrums before they are finally able to crack the case.