truepenny | UBC: Brady, The Gates of Janus

The Gates of Janus: An Analysis of Serial Murder by England's Most Hated Criminal, Expanded Edition by Ian Brady

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm giving this book five stars as a primary source. Because whatever you think about Brady and Brady's motives in writing the book, and how much of what he says is lies, Brady is giving the reader a Boschian picture of the inside of a serial killer's head. He tells you openly that serial killers lie. He talks about why they lie, and so when you catch Brady lying, you know what's going on.

It's a strange experience, full of cognitive dissonance. Brady is clearly very intelligent (clearly, like several of the other serial killers he discusses, just not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is), very rational. He's an excellent writer. He lays out the information he has about his subjects crisply, concisely, and with an eye for tiny but vital details.

And he's a psychopath.

(He differentiates clearly between psychopaths and psychotics and then tells you that he was diagnosed psychotic. But he's given you the information you need to see, while he may have what he calls secondary affective symptoms of psychosis, he's a psychopath.)

If this were not a primary source, I would give it three or four stars, because Brady spends way too much time discoursing on his theory of "moral relativism," a truckload of Nietzschean bullshit that follows naturally from the inherent built-in belief of the psychopath that whatever he wants to do is right. (Brady can recognize, and even cogently analyze, the fallacy in others, but he can't see it in himself.) It's both infuriating and boring--and intensely valuable if you genuinely want to understand how psychopaths think. The contempt for everyone around him (especially police and prison officials), the contempt for his audience that oozes out of everything he says (it clearly never occurs to him that the person reading this book might actually be as intelligent and "self-aware" as he is--"self-aware" is in quotes because Brady's self-awareness is a remarkably close mirror of the "self-awareness" of his fellow psychopaths, Eric Harris and Ted Bundy), the absolute certainty that he shouldn't have to obey the laws, which he bolsters with a great deal of nonsense about the corruption of society--not that his critique is wrong, power does corrupt and the people who gain power are very likely to be just as psychopathic as Brady and his criminal brethren (*cough*topical relevance*cough*), but he takes from that it's therefore morally better to be a criminal, which is what he means by "moral relativism." This is a psychopath who has had a lot of time to think about his belief system, to elaborate and defend it, and I'm sure that what he wanted most from writing this book was a captive audience for his Hitlerian rant. Boring and infuriating, but at the same time you can see the way that his thinking always makes that same twist back into the center of the maze rather than finding its way out. Extremely intelligent, perfectly rational (he's a psychopath, not a psychotic), and absolutely condemned, like the Minotaur, to live in the labyrinth he's built for himself.

(I find it hilarious that in his afterword to the second edition, Colin Wilson is shocked to discover that he's been corresponding for ten years with a psychopath: "I knew that Brady was a sex killer, and that his chosen victims were children. What I failed to grasp is that this involved an incredibly high degree of self-centeredness" (316). Colin Wilson's pontificating (particularly about serial killers as "dominant males") annoys me profoundly, so I admit to a certain degree of schadenfreude in watching him falling face-first into the trap that he himself built. What Wilson describes of his correspondence with Brady reminds me very strongly of Ted Bundy's correspondence with Ann Rule. Brady and Bundy maintain the same supercilious patronizing attitude until something trips one of their triggers, and then they go off in prima donna hissy fits. Intelligent psychopaths conforming to the pattern that's worn into their mental circuits. You knew it was a snake, Mr. Wilson. Why are you surprised that it bit you?)

Brady discusses Henry Lee Lucas (with utter contempt for both Lucas, whom he considers a miserable excuse for a serial killer and for all the law enforcement officers who bought the line of goods Lucas was selling); John Wayne Gacy; Graham Young; Dean Corll; Peter Sutcliffe; Richard Ramirez; the Cleveland Torso Murderer (whom Brady knows as "the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run," which is a much better name); Ted Bundy; the Green River Killer; Carl Panzram; and Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. He is an excellent analyst, as long as you remember to compensate for the psychopathic lens, and as I said above, an excellent writer, and most of those chapters are well worth reading on their own merits. (Brady admires Panzram too much, and that chapter is mostly adulation.) As Robert Keppel learned with Ted Bundy (see The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer), you have to watch for where Brady, in talking about other serial killers, is actually talking about himself. Both Bundy and Brady are trying to explain how hard it is for serial killers to talk about their crimes, both because of shame (Guilt? No. Shame? Yes.) and because of what Brady calls the hidden agenda, the true reason for the murders, the den at the center of the labyrinth where the Minotaur lives. Brady says that serial killers will do anything to protect this last hidden mystery, and you have to remember that he always includes himself in that.

I find it really interesting that both Brady and Bundy seemed unable to conceptualize of a serial killer like Gary Ridgway. Brady argues for two killers using the Green River site, but he's arguing from his recognition of the killings as a psychopath's crimes, and he, like Bundy, can't not put himself in that equation. He can't imagine a psychopath as stunningly banal as Gary Ridgway, someone who was perfectly happy being mediocre in every way except this one thing. It's another place where the value of this book as a primary source shines through.

In his afterword, which I recommend skipping entirely, Peter Sotos makes much of his loathing for Brady, citing specifically Brady's refusal to reveal the location of Keith Bennett's body. Leaving aside the fact that Brady may genuinely be unable to find the grave, this is something that he shares with Bundy and Ridgway, the idea that the body, hidden, is the significator of that hidden mystery at the center of the serial killer's dark and fundamentally empty life, that thing that he will die rather than articulate. No connection to the victim as a living human being (Rule comments on that as a commonality between Bundy and Ridgway, that they both attached far more strongly to inanimate objects than to people), but the corpse and the corpse's hiding place are awash in meaning and power. It's not necessarily cruelty that keeps Brady silent (although cruelty is certainly, to him, a beneficial side effect); it's that last shred of the mystery, that last thing that he knows and no one else in the world does.

View all my reviews