by Ian Brady
Keightley has been reluctant to speak about the relationship; it is not something that Brady wants publicised.
Today, though, speaking at his Black Country home, the retired lecturer is offering an extraordinary insight into the mind of a man whose crimes, even now, hold the public imagination in their grip.100
Brady prods his biography into Gates of Janus. Anything that comes after the hardly recalcitrant introduction of himself as the narrator for the world the reader wants made vivid is stuck back in what he did. Because it’s not any killer’s name on the book, the specifics in how a writer now separates himself from the others in label—supporting the claim of grand insight, political application and individually packaged bravery where all those others just moan insane after horny—is what his name will become. That Brady carelessly pretended that those bright details, lies even, weren’t supposed to be part of the story he was trying to tell. Is sad. The book was to be published without his name, fuck, has to be a decision about the smarmy details. As if only mistakenly then left to the audience to guess why. Hoping that an objective logic and old-fashioned moral discussion could inspire begrudging respect into impersonal solid truth. What you’ve read in every fucking 20-plus books on the case. Or didn’t you know that? Brady, like Smith and Alan Bennett, Myra and Ann West, have commented on many of those books, having read them, expanded on them, divulged back stories and inaccuracies added over the rumbling plodding history.
Only ostensibly did Brady intend the book to be a review of serial killers. Those he saw himself related to only by the common misunderstanding of law and green universalities. Assuming he could strip apart all others’ hypocrisy as he refused to lower himself to the level of his audience—an audience that he chooses to imagine rather than understand. A necessary audience in his case. Arms folded around his chest, sunglasses fit to hide his piercing or cataract eyes, he pretended that he was talking to those interested in the subject rather than those whose interest was, if not in him, then already more learned than he wanted. Prick’s truth is, Brady’s audience is not made up of the serial killer fawns who write him letters and send him packages and save his signature. His fans are almost entirely those who despise the choices he made. He sides with his readers by offering the same dispassionate understanding that comes with seeking the generalities as seen from above rather than a corner. Talk about what he’s been watching for way too long. Comes off like a pervert. Creeping, hiding, denying. Charming and preferable as that is. Even those who agree with his decision that an apology would be impossible and shamelessly goaded, might still prefer a slight degree of introspection when it is introspection that he’s selling his expansion on.
I’m guessing this is what his definition of pornography would be then. It was his design, or his compulsion, perhaps his taste, to go further than discussing mere forensics and crime theory into his favored specialty: railing at those who have said they have figured out what he is responsible for. Brady shows that he knows his audience perfectly well, is talking directly to them, addressing them on their own terms if not also his own. The experience of existentialism (Brady used “crime” and “murder” before short-handing the tribunal) is to be considered sans prurient… gloss. Enough but polite, concerned, protective. Pornography is defined by, in court, that which is deemed obscene; that which has no redeeming value, prurient, by recognizing the effect such material or thought has on those who can’t control themselves. The lowest common denominator who act on the wrong point, the bad idea that, as decency demands, must be considered. I’m only guessing as to how Brady’s definition might prop or cloud his self-assured, self-suppressed remove, his good taste and my seriously low version but his common (vulgar) use of the words as pejorative is clear and mostly only convenient. And though I’m loath to pin definitive definitions to the way Brady uses the words—especially since the consonant definitions of these words in court is the precise problem with vague laws that pretend or seek to match exacting consequence to fluid concepts in questionably protected speech. But it’s going to come up again. Prurient, by Brady’s insult, is the opposite of his intentions—non-lurid. Graphic. At least, then, this might be why he chooses to broadly define already broad theories. And if I need to explain my original afterword and I was hoping I wouldn’t. Defensively. See it as me trying hard as fuck not to condescend as much as Brady does. I wrote about the levels between prurience and desire. Check; the levels keep going. Exactly where I saw Brady within the text betraying the tabloid pitch-and-hide mentality that he seems to denigrate throughout his entire book but delivers to the morons he hates nonetheless. His honesty stops and if I make a point about that, I sound like another dick trying to argue for free speech rights to be offensive, or shocking, but essentially honest. I wasn’t searching for honesty. Pick one to believe: Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, David Smith. I pick Ann West. And I certainly don’t think she even knew what was going on. There’s more there than simple, base, prurient. And I love that within all that noise that I can’t help (literally) shit out, I was doing what Brady wasn’t and thinking of the kids that got hurt. And their families. I’d like to trust them. I find it very difficult to say a thing without it meaning two things—one snide, one sympathetic, here certainly, those, and I get away with sounding like I’m whatever side that particular yearning bent wants to settle on in a stupid review.
In a book on child pornography, and there are none as good as this, you’ll rarely find such damage. Most books on child pornographers are written for the academic and medical field. Very few biographies, whereas true crime murder pulp is ubiquitous. Confession as support and recognition, drawn from dyadic picks of authors and psychologists and artists; most of that comes off desperate and sincere in juxtaposed trial and medical transcripts.
The court heard from Timothy Cassell OC, barrister of Cooke, of how his client, now aged 71, was a lonely man who received no visitors in jail apart from the medical orderly. He went on further, informing the court that Cooke had had three strokes and a heart attack. I don’t know whether he had or hadn’t, and didn’t really care, neither did I care about his lack of visitors. He had a hiatus hernia and severe back problems, apparently. I recall thinking it wasn’t long ago he was dancing around me in Wandsworth Prison, shadow boxing and the like. And, if he was ill, would anybody care?
I thought of all the misery he’d inflicted on others throughout his life; lives lost, families torn apart. No doubt, due to his age he must have had some health problems, but how many of his supposed ailments were all part of his manipulative skills? I’d seen him limp when he chose to, pretending to have a bad leg; I’d also witnessed him develop a sudden chesty cough, to gain some sympathy and as a delaying strategy to give him time to think. In my book, he was a consummate actor who could never be taken at face value.101
Pick another word for honesty. A better word for the concept. Ignore the ideal context for choosing a single verity. Another word that fits exactly the same then. All at once. Pornography. I was looking for the pornography in prurience, the honesty in photographs. There isn’t any. I was looking for Pain. I was collecting the pain inside the photograph and had to add the voices. I trusted, honestly, that what you were saying about the photographs highlighted and reconnected the suffering you were sucking out or insisting on.
I’ll sound defensive next. Again. No matter what I say. But. And then. I don’t think any call of what I wrote as appalling is all that much off the mark. To say that it was what was expected of those who came to the book looking for something other than my specified interest would certainly have me echoing Brady’s miserable technique at truth parsing. Those of his audience looking for lights into his mind rather than what he did, might have done, could certainly find the afterword well beneath them. Brady could and would find it wrong factually as well as silly, repulsive. Another loudmouth trying to guess what he did from what he wanted, talking about the girls and boys as if he knew what happened when boys and girls went through what he actually di
d do to them. I wrote in the sensational manner that the tabloids promise and never deliver enough of. So, actually, I didn’t. Seeing the tabloids as offering more celebrity affairs than the sex “crimes” that Brady wants, and the journalists and readers repeatedly denouncing these affairs as hypocritical and tasteless, they being above such scandals, I’d offer that it is Brady’s sensationalism that I find more galling and tabloid-esque than he does mine.
Brady likes to think he’s writing for the engaged, the intellectuals, the middle classes in the UK, the Guardian readers, rather than the tabloids, the quick garish headliners and pub talkers, the good earth, the commoners. He should understand, my opinion, that the articles in the quality press, his phrase, report on his doings and casings almost always as a review of the tabloids rather than him and his new complaints. The tabloids that have created Brady and the commoners that the real press have to explain things for, while talking indirectly above their heads, is actually the style that Brady has adopted for his book.
It is human nature to long for the forbidden then resentfully and jealously punish those who have actually sampled it.
Should you question the truth or validity of this general proposition, official statistics show that 95% of murders and sexual abuse crimes are committed by members of the victim’s own family, or relatives and friends of the family. Only 5% of victims are murdered or sexually abused by strangers.
The popular mass media, primarily for commercial reasons, understandably gives scant coverage to such embarrassing analytical statistics. It would make their readers or viewers feel morally uncomfortable, guiltily glancing at one another in the sanctity of the home, and blaming the media for their dilemma. That is bad for business! Much more profitable to divert, expediently and sensationally, all public attention on to the 5%, especially the small fraction of that 5% who are serial killers.
This lucrative, selective social engineering by the media industry, especially the tabloids, enables the general public to indulge itself ritualistically in ostentatious paroxysms of self-righteous indignation. So perhaps Oscar Wilde was in error when opining that the only thing lower than a prostitute is a prison warder. Tabloid reporters must surely be in the running.
More often than not it is foolish to try to kid a kidder. There are no saints in this world, only liars, lunatics and journalists.102
Hindley, 1995:
You add that what happened is still part of a recurring nightmare, “something that should never be forgotten but recalled only to remind the comfortable and complacent of how bestial human nature can be.”
You don’t need to remind me of this; I know just how low humans can fall.
But you should address that message to the gutter press and its editors and owners who have constantly and relentlessly reminded the nation for 30 years of what the trial revealed had happened, embroidered with their own lurid versions. And, even worse, have never ceased to distress the families of the victims and my own mother, by equally relentless phone calls and visits with “revelations” and for comments. I recently received a letter from Mrs. Ann West expressing her distress about what she’s been told is my book and of constantly being pestered by the press.103
As way of defense. All this shit about who you cared for and what caused you to react to the various shit options you physically had, opposed to what dreams you wanted or what fairness was owed to you by those simplistic honest scuttlings and kept away from you by you psychologically after lot, were going to have to be left to those who were looking for explanations of why. Here’s your fucking problem. It’s there. All through the book. But. Of course. Few will give it a chance since how Brady and Myra directly dealt with their ugly dull plight required them to look to the sides of their own, confuse it with looking inward, next yelling back upward, impotently, and finally finding nice temporary but tragic ways of escaping drudgery if not cruelty. Sounds cozy and I’d rather you not.
What it looked like. That’s my problem. Not only.
Adam in his short publisher’s note was stating his own interest in the book and siding with Brady’s well-worn hatred of life, not love of specific sexual acts and birdsong. He carefully gave Brady’s use of the phrase “cesspit” its due. Adam agreed, there’s not much here to keep anyone happy. What Brady had to say about life on this miserable planet made some sense in—once again—existential terms. It all seems rather unfair. Until you get to the way some rational person deals with love and respect and, weirdly, loyalty and need. “Rational” meaning the tabloid caricature that at once formed and dismissed Brady. If anything, it’s not Myra’s pandering hope for a life of theatres and art venues and safe jobs and promotions that is depressing. Or a lie. But that in any life, that’s what you might want, not get, from happy. See the real you in the real them, convince them of you for you. Sounds happy to whom? What kind of idiot take-it-up-the-asshole cunt would put up with prizes like fucking that? At the end of everything else. Like what you did and then saw what it was. Years, minutes, later. What you miss still. Differently. So change that.
Re Sotos and his rambling, incoherent, pornographically lurid addition. He deliberately contorted and invented, then presented as factual—West’s head was not “caved in”—the trial transcript clearly documents there wasn’t even a mark to denote a conclusive cause of death. Second, the judicially banned quotes from the book by avaricious thief Chief Supt. Topping were based on concoctions by Hindley—costing the publishers a £50,000 fine, banning of the book, all of Topping’s earnings plus his own court costs and that of the Manchester Police. Third, the fictional source of knowledge of Janus, dressed up as a person obviously collecting every book and newspaper cutting re my case (in fact Sotos himself, as his numerous erotine quotes in Janus indicate), was in actuality a (…) friend of mine who owns a record company. She told me she spoke to Sotos, and detailed his obsession with my case as his extensive collection of everything written about it in four decades. And, anyway, your real source of knowledge was Colin Wilson not Sotos—but it was a useful device for allowing Sotos to write—what the New York press described as “merely appalling”—afterword which you carefully neglected not to mention or consult with me about for now obvious reasons. You merely throw Sotos’ rambling rubbish in as a sop to the rabble, ignoring the fact that the book was not about me but by me, and originally written under a pseudonym (had I not been on this present now 33-month hunger strike being force-fed daily by nasal tube, I wouldn’t have agreed to publish under my name). Further, you expect me to believe it would’ve been “inappropriate” not to include Sotos’ incomprehensible obscenity (which you, satirically, describe as “wasn’t totally positive”), after four decades of understandably negative attacks and, predictably, only more of the same when the book was published. Wasn’t Wilson’s lengthy “Introduction”—to the “Moors Case” rather than me—negative enough, or, as I state in Janus did you wish to conform to the authority/rabble conditioning that it’s not “nice” to say or ascribe anything positive to “criminals” (the only distinction between two categories being one has been caught and the others not yet been, and still all still posing as non-criminals)? Sure, your Publisher’s Note positively justified your wish to publish. I wrote the whole book in a deliberately detached, clinical, unsensational—or prurient style, only being forced to add personal asides at the justifiable insistence that I “personalize” it for marketing reasons, and fulfillment of public expectation of candid unorthodoxy considering its author. In short, non-lurid jacket, non-lurid contents—then at the end an “afterword” equivalent to “opening a lavatory door of wall scribbling.” The fact that Sotos was lying throughout (or had been briefed to lie for the book) is reinforced by the totally opposite review he gave in other publications—or is he schizophrenic as well as (?) exhibitionist? Not that it matters. Excuse hasty handwriting.
As stated, I’m taking legal action to have that Afterword removed from any future publications of the book, and am already in police contact re their
copyright action and ban of Topping book, and Sotos’ breach of it by quotes in Janus. I’m also instructing/consulting with Mr. Birnberg re legal actions possible. It amazes me that Wilson allowed his association with Janus to be contaminated by the Sotos afterword—or wasn’t he informed or consulted in advance? My “reputation”—I couldn’t care less!! You’ve missed the point entirely. Readers regard the “afterword” as “incoherent,” “inaccurate” and “illiterate.” Refresh your memory on “loyalty” in Janus. Some reliable American friends had no need to and are taking an interest in Sotos. It’s remarkable that the USA comprises 5% of world population but 25% of world prisons.
Brady recommends the court documents to reclaim a sentence in the first afterword. He uses it to denote a “factual” laziness or sexually crazed, desperate, and pruriently blind prejudice on my behalf, but its true purpose is to spot an extra-cynical device used to conspire against him. He’s directing attention to what I should know “factually” as I’ve gaudily, carefully researched every public inch of what’s only theatrically and then facetiously available.
There’s an uglier problem here. Locked to the desperate information that has Brady keeping his truth and lies and lessons and confessions and denotations and remorse and revenge and sights and smells and assholes and realizations and denials to whatever is now or ever has been left of himself. And me wanting to buy what he wants to sell. Wanting others to thrash around in lurid “facts” for him to let loose in price is the degenerate-cum-shylock merely repeating his press and fan letters and biographies.
Wasn’t even a mark.
The last line in the afterword is that it is pornography, a specific kind, lest it be seen as something less defined than the usual casually tossed-off pejorative. Brady’s understanding of the afterword isn’t as off the mark as his contention of incoherent, rambling or lurid would have it. There’s some worth in his quick rehearsals to imagined arguments, especially in the pleasure he seems to take in speeding them off before he can get himself out of the way of anything less certain. An argument for his book being no less a monologue in the same way could lend an extra excitement to reading him. As is my wont and hope is his intention. Few others have written so close to the bone and it might only be my psychosis that sees his defenses as more sexual than sex or psychology. But there’s something there that begs for some work beyond facts and lay psychologies and yet I find it difficult to say anything that doesn’t seem to take the obvious cheap shots. Given his situation and the obvious parallel to typical pedophile double-speak. His desire is evident, chaotic, perfect.