Death Of A Murderer
by Rupert Thomson

Read October 2007
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library
Essay written January 13th, 2008

I liked Soft! a lot. I liked The Five Gates Of Hell even more. And I read reviews of Death Of A Murderer leading me to believe that this would be even better. It wasn't, in my opinion.

First of all, do they even have serial killers in England? I can't imagine such a thing. "Care for a spot of tea, love? Jolly good. Into the chipper with you."

I apologize. That was uncalled for.

It just didn't strike me as interesting, I guess, and that's what makes me a bad book reviewer person. I can't articulate it any better than that. But then, I'm not a reviewer, I'm just a dumb slob with a computer tapping his thoughts away into the ether. This isn't a review, it's an intellectual fart. If you thought it was a review, you were misinformed.

I wrote in my earlier intellectual fart about The Town That Forgot How To Breathe that I thought its cover was designed by Chip Kidd. I was wrong. The cover for that book was not designed by Chip Kidd. The cover for Death Of A Stranger was designed by Chip Kidd. It's all coming back to me now. This was designed by Chip Kidd, and The Town That Forgot How To Breathe was not, although The Town That Forgot How To Breathe still had the better cover. This cover, for Death Of A Murderer was okay, but nothing special. Nothing to write home about, despite, as I said before, being designed by Chip Kidd, the greatest book jacket designer working today. They can't all be home runs, can they?

Back to the book itself. I just didn't care about the main character, whose name I can't even remember. He seemed like a pale reflection of a real human being. Maybe that was the existential point of the novel and I just missed it. But he was the father of child with Down's Syndrome, and seemed ashamed of that. I know a couple with a child with Down's, and they love him to pieces, just as they love their other two kids. Every parent loves their child, Down's or no. This author maybe didn't feel the same way. Or maybe it's a British thing. Who knows? This bothered me a bit about Something Happened by Joseph Heller too (I mean besides the excessive use of parentheses). In that one, the narrator had a mentally retarded son, and wanted to kill him. It was disturbing. Plus it just wasn't a very good book besides that.

Death Of A Murderer was certainly better than that, but that's setting the bar pretty low. Read The Five Gates Of Hell first. That one is spectacular.

I'm not sure which library branch this one came from, because I requested it online for pick-up at the White Bear Lake branch. It doesn't make a difference.

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