My Weekly Book

Prescription for Murder: The true story of mass murderer Dr Harold Frederick Shipman – Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie

At the outset I felt pretty guilty about reading this, having ferreted it somewhat shamefacedly out of the crime section of the library and smuggled it home with the title turned inwards. It all seems so voyeuristic, somehow. Plus, it plugs into something that’s been troubling me all year. It’s all very well trying to read a set number of books in a particular period – 20, 50, 100, whatever – but where’s the quality control? The only guarantees are the standards that you choose to apply. Lots of people’s are far higher than mine, as the number of mysteries and thrillers on my ‘read this year’ list should testify. This is what I was wondering – was this something I should ever have been reading in the first place? Shouldn’t I have been aiming higher?

[Buy from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

And, as it turned out, I learned a few important lessons in reading it – foremost among them not to be such a bloody literary snob. This isn’t just a trawl through the salacious details of a serial killer’s early life and modus operandi. It’s a serious attempt to try to understand how an event of the magnitude of this one affects a community – where an essential relationship of trust is destroyed and almost everyone knows or is related to a victim. And it’s a tribute to the people who were killed, reminding us that these were not lonely, unregarded old ladies with no-one to mourn them but busy, active people with full lives, at the heart of their community. It also pays tribute to those people – doctors, police officers, undertakers and, most movingly, a taxi driver who was seeing his elderly clientele dying off almost by the week - who were the first to notice what was going on.

There’s one more reason why this book was a good and interesting read – it’s by a local journalist whose agency was the first on the case with staff in court during the trial. That gave it an extra level of authenticity and appeal. I like books that are ‘the first draft of history’ – I certainly came away from the contemporaneous press coverage, before anyone had really worked out the full extent of what was going on, feeling pretty confused. Now I understand much better, and I feel that is a perfectly worthwhile aim.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 10:42 pm and is filed under 2006 - Also read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.