The Lost Boy [Mass Market Paperback]

This is a very readable book from Duncan Staff who, unlike other authors on this subject, had quite a bit of personal contact with Myra Hindley. Staff talked to her over the phone from her prison cell and was allowed to read her autobiography. I first thought the author was being too sympathetic to Myra as he detailed her ordinary day to day life before she met Brady but I realised that all he was doing was saying that she was like Brady in the final analysis an ordinary human being. They existed like you and I - too often they have just been portrayed as inhuman monsters staring blankly out of their mug shots. Where they differed from the majority of humanity was in their completely amoral view of the world which caused them to turn their wicked fantasies into reality.

The book covers a lot of Myra's personal history before she met Brady and for the most part it is very ordinary stuff: going to dances, hanging out with mates, caring for animals and children. The book suggests that Myra maybe could have developed a normal life if she hadn't met Brady although one imagines that her life would have been difficult given her poverty, limited opportunities and her brutalisation by her drunk of a father in early childhood. She also had a desire for thrills beyond her drab working class existence in Manchester and fatally she found the person who could give her these thrills when she met and started going out with Ian Brady. It is not uncommon to have dreams in order to escape a drab existence - what is very uncommon is fulfilling these dreams through the murder of children.

In the book Brady comes across as a stone psychopath - a really nasty evil piece of work. It never seems for a moment that he could have developed a different life or become a better person - he just gets worse and worse - ending up insane in an asylum. Mind you although in the end he did the raping and murdering of 5 children she was as bad as him. The book states that he may not have turned his fantasies into reality without her tacit acceptance. Scarily when going to court to answer for these murders with the weight of evidence crashing down on her, and the horrific 13 minute tape of their abduction and torture of 10 year old Lesley Ann Downey being played to her again and again, all she was worried about was how her hair and clothing looked for her day in court.

The book is particularly good at refuting the notion that Myra was somehow the victim and passive stooge of Brady. She was actually a very strong character and willingly participated with him in his murderous spree.

When I think of how horrific Hindley and Brady were I always remember the lines from Blake's "Tiger" poem: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" How can such evil people be in this world? How can they walk around like us and talk like us but have such differently wired brains? One thing is for sure such people should never again be allowed to enjoy the pleasures and freedoms of civilized society. I for one could never understand why anyone would have fought for Myra Hindley's release. She gave up any claims for freedom when she did what she did and she never did stop stringing people along and conning them about her 'reformed character' until the day she died.

This book is actually about the story of Myra Hindley, chiefly based on her autobiographical writings, communication with the author and with those close to her. How truthful all this is, is questionable as there are no footnotes, source lists/bibliography. The book says little about the subject of the book as one might think by the title, and that is its main failing. As interviewees and examinees are told, answer the question and this the author fails to do. Perhaps another title could have been better. There is also rather too much padding - it does not serve the book's purpose for the author to digress for a page about Chetham's Library, Engel's writings and various other matters that the author includes and should have been editetd out prior to publication. One of Your Own is a rather better biography of Hindley, as another reviewer states.

In the literary world I am often taken aback by the way publishers wishing to seek greater profit from their publications very much muscle-in on the way the front covers look.

Aside from a few examples from the past i'm sure this isn't the case with the actual content of a book. But the front cover has to be styled in the way publishers reckon the book-browser would catch the eye and decide to purchase it. The change of the cover from Staffs' book here from the hardcover to the paperback sums up what is wrong with Duncan Staffs book - even if the author didn't have much say in the in the physical appearance of it.

In the hardcover version the front cover (which can be seen on this site) depicts the 'Lost Boy', victim, Keith Bennett of whom the remains have never been found. In an attempt to sell more copies in the paperback version the cover changed. Instead of depicting the victim the publisher decided it would shift more copies if the front cover depicted the iconic mugshot of Myra Hindley instead. Much in the same way the tabloids printed Hindley's mugshot accompanied by some story of very little consequence purely to boost circulation figures.

You are somewhat bamboozled - perhaps quite subconsciously to buying the book believing that you feel you are reading the deviant behaviour of Brady and Hindley (with the particular emphasis on Hindley) by aligning yourself with the tragic fact that one of their victims has never been found. This is an illusion. The change of the front cover from the two versions, in a metaphorical sense, backs this up.

Duncan Staff's sycophanticism is all aimed at you - the potential purchaser of his not so well written book and as a previous reviewer, choo-choo, has found its factually inaccurate in key ways. You should feel on a certain level that its so tragic, so bad, so incomprehnsible that Brady should have the 'perfect murder' in the form of Keith Bennett and that perhaps a search should be made for his remains, that you buy the book. But the references Staff makes to this are fleeting, instead he 'analyses' Hindley. It is virtually all about Hindley, her unpublished autobiographies, her traits, her personality, her infancy, her scraps in prison, her love life, observations made of her by those who knew her. Keith Bennett the victim is merely a covert selling point to pick through Hindley and her life whom Staff had access to. Namely because he was in the media and she could utilise him for whatever purpose much in the same way Staff utilised her for profit. Usually the profit seeking motive by journalists which pick over an individuals deviant behaviour is covertly summed up as 'in the public interest' but in this particular example, to do that and then create such an illusion that its in the benefit of a child victim who is unlikely to be found, to put it mildly sits very uncomfortably with me.

I cant help feel a certain admiration for the way Ian Brady attempted to create mischief and sue Duncan Staff. Staff accuses Brady of having a 'magpie mind' in that he read books and pilfered what ever he thought looked useful and fitted it into his own perceptions and moral relativity and whatever didn't fit was discarded. And perhaps this is quite accuate. I dont know. I've never met the man, neither do I think has Duncan Staff. But perhaps it takes one to know one, in that it seems this 'magpie mind' is what Staff does with Hindley's unpublished autobiographies. On the points he finds useful - not in the pursuit of finding the missing victim but just to feed you and me in providing more knowledge about Hindley - he goes to some 'expert' to give creditbility to his assertions.

Personally I have no real real objections either way to people profiting from other people's deviance - whether it be monetary (in the case of Staff and others paid to comment on crime) - or in the pursuit of status which was the case with Lord Longford. Industries are built on it. But if they do they should be straight about it. And not sugar coat it from the circumstances around a particular victim which I feel is the case here.