THE ENGLISH TALENT FOR SERIAL KILLING

Alongside the native English genius for science, literature and mindless yobbery, England has produced the world’s finest serial killers. They’re hugely popular cultural figures, with frequent shows on dedicated TV channels and legions of followers.

No other country can match them. In the UK itself, the only Scots one thinks of are ‘Bible John’, Nicola Sturgeon and Dennis Nilson - who performed in the archetypally dreary north London suburb of Muswell Hill. Wales and Northern Ireland simply fail to qualify. 

In Europe, Italy has its moments but the serial-killing concept seems at odds with the cultural warmth of any Mediterranean country. Eastern Europe is awash with homicidal maniacs, cannibalism being especially popular in the countries of the former Soviet Union. But the grim history of industrial-scale state slaughter, set against endless steppes and forests, makes this seem unremarkable and inevitably part of the landscape. 

Germany and Austria suffer from similar political and historical limitations. The French are far too serious and pretentious to stoop so low, though their deranged imitators the Belgians make an effort. Only Scandinavia offers genuine potential, but its stark modernism and grey cloudscapes - well-captured by 'Nordic Noir' - make such events seem already fictionalised. The genre lacks any spark of the individuality so notable in English crime capers, especially serial killing. Further afield, Japan seems far more promising.  

On that note, Uncle Sam is the world's leading producer of serial killers. But they're mostly an unamusing and unassuming crowd, nearly anonymous in many cases. True, the landscape offers local character. But the sheer weight of this vast consumer culture, above all its worshipping of success, overwhelms all. Even Ted Bundy was indistinguishable from some West Coast news-anchor or tiresomely grinning 'no win, no fee' attorney. 

Americans are good at body-count but they lack that instinctive English ability to combine horror with absurdity and picturesque pathos. Deplorable though it is to admit, there's often a hint of likability in an English serial killer - something completely lacking in his American counterpart. Perhaps it's our class-system combining with love of grimness, pessimism and gallows' humour.

I'd an American friend who was delighted by our English taste for negative cosy bleakness. He'd never heard that ubiquitous phrase 'I can't be arsed', until he suggested we crossed the road to another pub. He found it so refreshingly different from the 'Hey! Great idea!' demanded in his culture of optimism.

Anyway, as Orwell famously observed in Decline of the English Murder, there’s something unmistakably and reassuringly English in setting and style for this grisly crew:

1. ‘Saucy’ Jack the Ripper: What can one say? The founding father for true crime weirdos, a creature seemingly created from the swirling East End miasma, a nostalgic misery of cobbles, gin and toothless crones waiting to be eviscerated. And Jack was definitely English. I reject absurd theories about Polish hairdressers or Russian anarchists. His ‘Dear Boss’ letter is funnier than most sit-coms and can only have been written by an Englishman.

2. Harold ‘Fred’ (to friends or victims) Shipman: A damn good doctor, if one avoided his legendary 'flu jabs. Thank God he was pre-Covid, or the death toll might have approached that suggested by the clown Ferguson, at Imperial College. Who can forget Fred’s blustering appearance - emerging from his Volvo in a green gilet - when the gloomy Hythe surgery was finally raided? His delightfully named wife Primrose completes the picture.

3. John ‘acid bath’ Haigh: A true gent, if one wasn’t being slowly dissolved in sulphuric or hydrochloric acid by him. Terrific sense of humour. He went to the gallows with a note in his jacket pocket, requesting the suit was donated to Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors.

4. John ‘just a whiff of gas’ Christie: Who doesn’t relish Richard Attenborough’s performance in Ten Rillington Place, as he administered the ‘Carbon monoxide or - as we call it in the medical profession - C O two’? Truly hilarious, until one was walled up in his grotty kitchen. But it has to be said, a more likable figure than most who now live in Notting Hill. On the gallows he complained of an itchy nose and hangman Pierrepoint quipped ‘don’t worry, I can fix that’, pulling the lever.

5. Fred West: Half man, half werewolf he may have appeared, yet the ladies loved his cheeky grin and 1970s sideburns. Expert builder, whose terrifying hooker wife Rose completed a model family, where games of 'sardines' had messy endings. Fred was a typical Shireman, a warning to idiots who eulogise rural England.

6. Dennis Nilson: Honorary Englishman and Stranglers fan. Keen on home cooking, Dennis annoyed the local sewer-men with what they thought was an addiction to KFC, human bones and skin blocking his drains. One time too many, and the rest is history. Less dangerous than many Scots.