Customer Reviews

The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2

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This book is a long, leisurely ramble through the gruesome history of murder and sex crime, starting with the Roman Emperors and ending at 7 AM on January 24, 1989 when Ted Bundy was led into the execution chamber at Starke Prison, Florida. Long sections are devoted to the Ismailis and the Order of Assassins, Vlad the Impaler, the Marquis de Sade, and the author's philosophical speculations on why men become criminals. His theory of criminology is influenced by A.E. van Vogt's speculations on "the right man" and the "dominant five percent," and on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. (After reading this book, I'm sure that Colin Wilson would classify the motive for the recent sniper killings as the need for self-esteem).

Maslow believed that human beings are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that certain lower needs need to be satisfied before higher needs can be addressed. There is a hierarchy of needs (physiological, safety, love, and esteem) that must be satisfied before a person can act unselfishly. As long as we are motivated to satisfy these cravings, we are moving toward self-actualization. Satisfying needs is healthy. Blocking gratification makes us sick or evil.

Wilson attempts to use Maslow's hierarchy of needs to find historical patterns in crime. For instance if men are starving or homeless, they might commit crimes to satisfy their physiological needs. According to the author, men didn't start indulging in sex crimes (to satisfy the need for love or self-esteem) until they were clothed, fed, and housed, i.e. sometime after the Industrial Revolution.

The Victorians invented rape? I don't think so.

If it weren't for the author's philosophical discursions and his attitude toward victims versus the "dominant five percent" of society (CEOs, Prime Ministers, and leaders of all sorts, including criminals), I'd give "The Mammoth Book of True Crime 2" another star. Colin Wilson is a masterful narrator when he sticks to the actual facts of the crimes. But his tendency to denigrate victims ("they were just prostitutes," "she had a face like a horse") and defend certain mass murderers, e.g. Hasan bin Sabbah (who founded the Order of Assassins, and became the first Old Man of the Mountain), Vlad the Impaler, and Charlie Manson, leads me to recommend against reading this book unless you already have strong convictions of your own concerning murderer versus victim.

A much better, more coherent book about crime is "Forty Years of Murder" by the British forensic pathologist, Keith Simpson.

This is not a regular true crime book. It's more like an essay on true crimes.

It's thick. It's more than 500 pages but it has no photos or pictures!

The author briefly described crimes ranging from the time of Roman Empires till 1989. Along with these stories, he expressed his theory or belief of why people committed crimes. I'm not interested in this kind of theory. I prefer to know when and how the crime was committed. How the detectives found the killer. Then how he was punished. In short, I'm interested in all the details of a crime, not a few details of a hundred crimes in a book.

Because of that, I give this book one star.