Three books – two I admired, one I couldn't finish

Two non-fiction crime books I read recently were fascinating and written with skill – while a third dismayed me

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Published in 2014, this is Helen Garner’s account of the trial of an Australian father accused of murdering his three sons. Father’s Day, 2005, window cleaner Robert Farquharson is driving to the home of his ex, with whom he had three boys, who were in the car. On a dark road, the car swerved off the highway and into a dam. The boys drowned while the father escaped from the water. Australia was rocked with the horror of it – but then left wondering whether this was really an accident, as the father insisted.

Several reviewers compared the book to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which, if anything, does it a slight disservice in that Capote, we now know, fictionalised some of his account. In This House of Grief, Garner is our eyes and ears at the trial, wondering, questioning, trying to comprehend the enormity of the crime levelled at Farquharson. She brings her novelist’s sensibility to recording the proceedings, emotions and characters involved.

For me, the book’s power is that Garner is compassionate while also fairly non-judgemental as an observer. She shares her impressions rather than pretends she knows it all or has special insight. This was apparently not an easy book to write, but while the case is heartbreaking, the book is absorbing thanks to the skill and sensitivity of the author.

Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police by Tom Harper

Last week, London’s Metropolitan Police drew the dire headline, Inspection finds Met Police failing or inadequate in key crime-fighting areas.

We’ve become numb to the unremitting parade of Met scandals. Met in special measures, Met racism, Met misogyny, spy cops, murder of Sarah Everard and on and on.

Researching The Real Ted Hastings, my book about how real-world corruption is reflected in the BBC drama Line of Duty, gave me a good perspective on the long history of bent coppering the UK’s biggest police force.

However, after reading Tom Harper’s book, I felt like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life – stuffed to bursting with incidents of police illegality, arse- covering, collusion with serious criminals, institutional cowardice and frequent failure to protect the public and uphold the law.

Harper has covered policing as a journalist for 16 years. For this book he has pulled together penetrating interviews with officers of many ranks. It is a compelling account of asymmetric failures in the capital’s force in recent decades.

The failures roughly fall into three categories. First, devastating and politically motivated cuts have left the capital’s divisions denuded of adequate resources to fight crime. Second, there are the chilling instances of the force either being penetrated by criminals or bent cops colluding with criminals. And finally, there is the ingrained self-serving management culture, more interested in playing down failures and whitewashing the Met’s reputation than rooting out wrongdoing.

From 1994’s Operation Othona, which suggested a network of traitors colluding with criminals at all levels of London’s force, to accounts of ‘black ops’ against police whistleblowers, the five failed investigations into the axe murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan, the attempted victim-blaming of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man accidentally shot by police in 2005, to the 2021 murder of Sarah Everard by off-duty officer and predator Wayne Couzens, and much more, this book is a formidable case against the modern Met.

Broken Yard has the effect that the weekly drip of horrendous, brain-dulling headlines does not. It leaves you with the firm conclusion that the whole institution needs to be broken up and re-constituted with new management, dedicated and on-going anti-corruption structures and an ineradicable focus on serving the public.

Anyone who thinks Line of Duty is over the top will realise after reading Broken Yard that the reality is worse.

Behold the Monster by Jillian Lauren

The crimes of US serial killer Samuel Little are the stuff of nightmares. He confessed to murdering 93 women, most of whom lived on society’s fringes and whose disappearance would not be investigated too rigorously.

Author Jillian Lauren got extraordinary access to Little while he was in prison. In hours of interviews, he confessed to being America’s most profilic serial killer.

Hoping to make a difference, restore the identities of forgotten victims, she talked at length to Little and wrote this account.

I could not read past page 70, however. Why? In a bid to give the victims a voice, the author makes up their thoughts and dialogue.

She describes the first victim, Mary, who encountered Little in a bar in 1971. The book switches to novel mode. Mary had not wanted to forget her cardigan. Every time the bar door opened, she thought her luck might change. Little comes in, calls her ‘little kitten’, asks why she’s so far from her family. She tells him they want to control her, then the men in her life wanted to do the same. ‘They don’t understand you,’ Little says to her. He drives her to a quiet spot, Mary leans back against her seat, more from exhaustion than from pleasure: ‘Let’s get in the back…’.

I could not read on. This felt creepily voyeuristic. Rather than giving the victims a voice, respect, the author, to my mind, was misguidedly fictionalising the horror of their encounter with Little. It seems extremely insensitive to me for a non-fiction writer to imagine their way into the thoughts and feelings of a victim in this way. She had the interviews, she could research the victims. Making it up offers no insight.

The jacket has a quote lauding the book as a ‘bewitching blend of empathy and brio’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘bewitch’ as to ‘enchant and delight’, which says more about the book’s backfiring effect than any high-minded stuff about doing justice to the victims.