The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis [Hardcover]

Ian Brady (Author), Colin Wilson (Introduction), Peter Sotos (Afterword), Alan Keightley (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2001

To understand human character, one must first explore the depraved reaches of human consciousness.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The infamous "Moors Murderer," writing from his U.K. jail cell, Brady provides a rambling account of the socio-philosophical and psychological genesis of the modern day serial killer, but it's emphatically "not an apologia." The child pornographer and convicted killer (of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, 12-year-old John Kilbride and others) spends the first half of the book contending that killers such as himself, who are free from societal, religious and moral chains, are able to provide greater insight into the criminal mind than psychiatrists, crime reporters or police. But this argument, in and of itself, is unsurprising, and any logical authority Brady might have been able to build up is undermined by page after page of his nihilistic ranting. Pointing to myriad problems present in overpopulated, self-satisfied, privileged societies, Brady imagines contemporary culture as a breeding ground for serial killers. To prove his point, he attempts psychological profiles of Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and other notorious killers. But these chapters are not profiles so much as they are detailed accounts of the gruesome crimes committed. While revisiting such felonies might be enjoyable for the hardcore true crime fan, for most readers the depictions will feel as gratuitous as the heinous crimes they describe. The relentlessly abrasive and controversial social critic Sotos (Pure), an aficionado of murders recorded on audio tape, adds a provocative afterword.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Admit it: you don't know nearly enough about Britain's lurid child-sex killings, the moors murders, or about the minds of serial killers like their perpetrator, Brady. The slayer himself probes the mindset of the serial killer--"a person who kills spasmodically over a comparatively lengthy period of time" rather than in the rampage characteristic of the mass murderer--for some 100 pages, then considers individually such exemplars of the type as Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy with the insight of a peer. A quiet, bookish lad, Brady waxed antisocial in his teens, as Colin Wilson explains in a lengthy biographical introduction. Brady's conception of moral relativism owes much to the theory of the superman Raskolnikov espoused in Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky is one of Brady's enthusiasms). Unbound by petty and arbitrary moral strictures, Brady sees personal choices as equivalent in worth, whether of regular or extra crispy, or of murder or rape. A significant addition to true crime literature, Brady's deposition has creepy entertainment value in spades. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 311 pages
• Publisher: Feral House; First Edition edition (October 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0922915733
• ISBN-13: 978-0922915736
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,064,929 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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28 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PRETENTIOUS AND LAUGHABLE, December 8, 2008

By 

Charles Blaine Fielding (SEATTLE, WA. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis (Hardcover)

Remember if you read this book that there is no Evil more depraved than to molest and kill children. And that is Ian Brady's only claim to recognition.

Brady obessionally praises the evil-doer as a heroic figure. Yet no where does he discuss or even allude to his own torturing, sexual molestation and murder of five helpless children. A strange omission indeed. Instead this accomplished child abuser treats, and largely bores, the reader with lies about his fanciful criminal career, incessant displays of his grandoise and fragile ego, inferior re-hashes of other serial killers and verbose psuedo-philosophizing. All mixed with ample doses of whining self-pity about the way he has been treated.

Remember too that Ian Brady is a consummate and complusive liar. He inadvertently reveals his lies {at page 284} when he points out that many prisoners escape into fantasy and come to half believe their "fictitious past". So take anything he says with more than a grain of salt.

The first half of "Gates" is taken up with Brady's sociopathic rantings. He hates everyone indiscriminately- except for himself. His monotonous diatribes are interpersed with idle threats about how the criminal classes are going to rise up and kill all the rest of us. In actuality, criminals despise child killers like Brady who they call "baby rapers" and attack whenever they are given the opportunity. Brady has had to be protected for his entire prison stay from his fellow prisoners. These comical rantings are more evidence of Brady's disconnect from the real world.

Brady's current populist pose is ridiculous. He was an avowed neo-Nazi who held the" masses" in contempt and himself above the law. And his child victims were hardly oppressors of the poor and down-trodden. Indeed they came from the same lower class working background as Brady himself. Brady never lifted a finger in his life against the upper-classes.

One of Brady's "heroes" is Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles "Night Salker" of the mid-1980s. Brady paints him as a fellow revolutionary who attacked and killed members of the WASP establishment. He did no such thing. Instead Ramirez attacked tiny Asian- American women because they were easy to subdue,like the wimp Brady who only attacked children. And Ramirez was finally captured by a crowd of his fellow Hispanics who were as appalled as everyone else by his butchery.

Another fantasy of Brady was that he killed after applying "auto-hypnosis" to himself. He never explains what this is. But what he really did was to idrink massive doses of alcohol. He was a heavy drinker and incipient alcoholic. Like Ted Bundy, he used alcohol to dull his senses and self- control. Colin Wilson, in his introduction to the book, makes a fundamental error in glorifying Brady as a man seeking super- normal experiences. But the opposite is true. Brady was incapable of any kind of exalted experience. His personal life was one of unremitting banality.

Brady incessantly lies too in portraying himself as a master criminal. He asserts he travelled about England committing unspecified crimes with a band of disciples. No such incidents occurred. He committed only his child killings and only in and around Manchester. His "disciples were only Myra Hindley and the dullish 17- year old Daivd Smith. And it was Smith who turned him into the police.

Like other serial killers, Brady was a weakling and coward who attacked by ambush only the weakest prey he could find. In the face of authority he became meek and compliant. And when the end came he meekly surrendered to an unarmed policeman disguised as a baker.

Only at the typewriter does he now construct a fictional larger-than- life portrait of himself. Then he asserts he killed disloyal disciples. Another lie, the result of wishful thinking. His follie-a- deux with Myra Hindley ended in prison when she opportunistically turned against him to tried to get released through her champion the deranged "Lord" Longford.

In compensation for all Brady's b.s., there is his laughable bad writing. One example is his fantasy of master criminal "whilst in pursuit of multifarious criminal activities in many cities". {page 217}. Such "multifarious criminal activies" never occurred. Brady's criminal career consisted of petty crimes for which he had a genius for being caught.

There is one key insight in the book. Brady admitts that his child-killing episodes were less than satisfactory. He realizes much too late- for Lesley Ann and his four other victims-the superiority of Fantasy over deed. Brady writes here in a rare authentic moment. He notes that killing itself is secondary. The real goal is to gain control over the victim. But the mundane requirements of this obviate the "pleasure". He cannot enjoy the tormenting, torturing and sexually abusing the victim because the practical considerations interfere. Hence he argues for the pure pleasures of fantasy. Too bad five children had to go through such torment for him to learn this lesson. But the children were killed primarily to destroy the evidence.
See page 39.

Conclusion:

Given the propensity of novelists and movie- makers to concoct serial killers as brilliant, bigger-than-life monsters- a la Hannibal Lector and "American Psyche"- Brady's book is a needed corrective. Behind his mask of "Janus" he is a pathetic loser, a tawdry little man.

Despite these criticisms, Brady's turgid exercise in self- justification is worth reading. He is the only child serial killer ever to try to justify himself in print. But it is the lies and fantasies that impress the discerning reader. It is Brady's own badly damaged ego that is most on display here.And his appallingly bad writing do provide some black comedic moments

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Cut and paste, July 9, 2008

By 

B. Hastie "Delivery boy" (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis (Hardcover)

Brady, a man of some intelligence, struggles with the written word. Like many an undereducated suburban letter-to-the-editor writer he tries to lift the tone by using long words where short would do. A fair proportion of the book is more or less lifted from other sources. Many of the crimes analysed start with fairly ludicrous descriptive passages dealing with the weather or the traffic, typical of lower end true crime writing. Given Brady was unable to do any field research you might assume that is what they are. Other more technical passages are lifted from such sources as Robert Hare's "Without conscience".

Brady could be accurately described as Sadean in that his crimes mirrored the fantasies you find in "120 days of Sodom", "Juliette" and other sources. On the other hand Nietzsche seems little more than a catch phrase to him. Old Friedrich would probably have found Brady's attacks on children more unter than uber.

Brady possesses little insight into his own psychological state and the resentments that drove him but does sometimes reveal himself obliquely. His analyses of the crimes of others are facile and occasionally random. All this is what we expect from a psychopath.

The book tries and fails to alter our impression of Brady, a small man who tortured and killed the weak.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but....., July 1, 2009

By 

C. Park - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis (Hardcover)

I for a brief time studied criminal psychology, and was fascinated with Brady and Hindley. I never could wrap my mind around them, as they do not fit with the typical profile of couple killers. To me what made them all the more monstrous was the fact that, despite the way the evidence looked, I do not believe these were sexual killings, but intellectual exercises in evil. Personally, the guy that just can't help but eat human flesh because of some bizarre need is far less frightening than the controlled, icy-cold Brady and Hindley, who just wanted to see how far they could go into the darkness just because it was there. The fact that their victims were children speaks volumes that Hindley and Brady never did. So I began a short correspondence with Brady which lasted long enough for me to know that he would never really let anyone know why, because the real reasons were so cloaked in all his verbosity that one would only come away with an impression of Brady as a learned man who just happened some years ago to murder. Which is what this book displays. I agree with some of the other reviewers- if you are into this sort of thing, you will probably find something worthwhile in it, if one can use that term in this context. But I do feel moral qualms about buying it- I read it at the library.