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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
HIS WRITING IS ELECTRIC, CONCISE, AND TRUE, October 7, 2007
Seldom does one read a novel as memorable as this. The prose is pristine, beautiful in its spareness, and the protagonist is incredibly affecting. Billy is, if you will, everyman. An ordinary fellow who through a device employed by the author looks back upon his life, his hopes, regrets, fears and, of course, loves. Billy Tyler is a policeman, an ordinary one without aspirations for promotion. He's married to Sue, a woman he seems to understand less now than he did when they wed ten years ago. "....here they were, bound together by little more than arguments and tears, by vicious words, by things they didn't even mean." Their only child, Emma, has Down's Syndrome. One evening a phone call comes - Billy has been assigned to guard the body of one of the most notorious murderers in England until the body is cremated. Her name is Myra Hindley and she has committed the most ghastly killings, even children were tortured before death. Billy is sent to the morgue to make sure nothing happens to the body, that no thrill seekers want a souvenir, a lock of hair, a remnant of clothing. It's not a pleasant assignment - the graveyard shift and he'll be alone. Sue begged him not to go, to call in sick because he shouldn't be around such evil. He replied that it was his job and so he went to the mortuary, taking his paper work with him, intending to catch up. Instead he remembered. It is through these reminiscences that we learn about Billy's youth, his courtship of Sue, and the difficulties in raising and keeping safe a child with Down's. He emerges as thoroughly likable, one with whom we can empathize, and one for whom we come to care. The aspirations of his younger years have vanished. As he comments, "Life could surge away from you at great speed, leaving you bobbing dumbly in its wake." The appearances of Myra are not spectral or frightening to him. It is almost as if her were viewing her with detachment. Yet, as he listens to her he realizes that everyone has been harmed by her heinous acts. "We were all damaged by what happened, he thought. We were all changed." Has that not happened to some of us? To say that Rupert Thomson is a major talent is an understatement. His writing is electric, concise, and true. This is an amazing story brilliantly written. - Gail Cooke
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entirely credible portrait of a life, August 29, 2008
This review is from: Death of a Murderer (Vintage International) (Paperback)
This could have been a very different sort of a book, given the set-up. Britain's most notorious criminal is a woman, never named, who together with her lover tortured and killed a number of children in the 1960s. After some thirty years in prison she has finally died of natural causes. The news of her death reopens old wounds: people revile her as much as they ever did, if not more. Her corpse, deep in the bowels of the hospital awaiting removal to a crematorium, requires police protection--from souvenir seakers, from people who would abuse it. Constable Billy Tyler is asked to take the graveyard shift, twelve hours locked alone in the room with a bank of refrigerated drawers--hers unmarked and locked. His wife begs him not to go, as if the corpse contains within it some transferable evil. But of course he can't refuse the assignment. This can't end well, we think. But this isn't that kind of a book. There may be ghosts in the mortuary, but if so it doesn't matter. Billy is left alone with his thoughts for most of the night, and we are privy to them, so that by the end of his shift Billy's character has been laid bare in spare prose that belies the power of the story. Some of Billy's memories are related to the woman he's guarding: her crimes intersected with his life in surprising ways. But mostly his life is no different from most people's: he's a good man who's done some bad things; he's been happy and loved and miserable and things haven't quite worked out according to plan; he can still feel shame over embarrassments experienced in childhood. He is, in the end, entirely credible. Death of a Murderer is a quiet read, surprising in its effect. The last scene--the last sentence--a small moment caught in simple prose, will break your heart--in a good way, I think. And it will leave you wondering how he did that, the author, just by putting words together on the page. -- Debra Hamel
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"She had reminded [everybody] of a truth that they had overlooked, or hidden from, or lied to themselves about.", August 11, 2007
Somewhat reminiscent of Patrick McCabe in his psychological intensity, Rupert Thomson tells the story of a murderer and the policeman who is guarding her dead body until it can be cremated. The unnamed murderer, the most hated woman in the UK, killed five people, three of them children, before dying of natural causes. Constable Billy Tyler, assigned to the hospital mortuary for a twelve-hour, overnight shift to protect the body from the press and the general public, "had no idea, at that point, that he was about to become part of the story." As Billy settles in for a long night, he reminisces about his own life, the father whom he has met only twice, his problems with his arrogant father-in-law, his sometimes turbulent marriage to Sue, and the difficulties of caring for their only child, a daughter who has Down Syndrome. In carefully described, cinematic episodes, Billy recreates his younger days and his relationship with Raymond Percival, who introduced him to break-ins and thievery and almost killed him as a joke. He thinks about his lovers and his best friend, who was dismissed from the police force after beating a suspect, and while on a break, he meets a South Asian man whose wife is in the hospital awaiting life-threatening surgery. Soon Billy, a simple man with few ambitions, soon finds himself entering a dream world in which the killer appears and speaks to him, and he begins to explore, superficially, some of life's big questions--what makes a killer, how far people will go for love, the nature of guilt, and, ultimately, the value of life. Through Billy's reminiscences, his repeated visits from the murderer's ghost, and the reality of his duty in the mortuary, the novel achieves high drama, and the reader becomes intimately acquainted with Billy's history, his thoughts, and his perceived similarities with the murderer. Written in unpretentious language and style, and featuring a main character who is an ordinary man with ordinary hopes and dreams for the future, the novel brings this everyman to life, creating a dramatic portrait of someone at a personal crossroad. Ironically, Billy finds himself learning from the killer. Reinforcing how small the differences may be between the cop and the killer, this dark novel explores familiar territory in new ways, appealing to a wide audience with its psychologically perceptive observations. n Mary Whipple
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