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History of a Drowning Boy by Dennis Nilsen

 


SYNOPSIS

Dennis Nilsen was one of Britain's most notorious serial killers, jailed for life in 1983 after the murders of 12 men and the attempted murders of many more.

Seven years after his conviction, Nilsen began to write his autobiography and over a period of 18 years he typed 6,000 pages of introspection, reflection, comment and explanation.

History of a Drowning Boy - taken exclusively from these astonishing writings - uncovers, for the first time the motives behind the murders, and delivers a clear understanding of how such horrific events could have happened, tracing the origins back to early childhood. In another first, it provides an insight into his 35 years inside the maximum-security prison system including his everyday life on the wings; his interactions with the authorities and other notorious prisoners; and his artistic endeavours of music, writing and drama. It also reveals the truth behind many of the myths surrounding Dennis Nilsen, as reported in the media.

Nilsen was determined to have his memoir published but to his frustration, the Home Office blocked publication during his lifetime. He died in 2018, entrusting the manuscript to his closest friend and it is now being published with the latter's permission.

Any autobiography present the writer's story from just one perspective - his own, and as such this record should be treated with some caution. An excellent foreword by criminologist Dr Mark Pettigrew offers some context to Nilsen's words, and this important work provides an extraordinary journey through the life of a remarkable and inadequate man.

REVIEW

I have found that there are not many words to describe the detail that makes me feel when thinking of this book. There have been times when I felt some form of sympathy towards Nilsen, however it is not long before I also have feelings of dread, nausea and just that sense of uneasiness. 

Before turning my eyes to the first page, I had absolutely no knowledge about Nilsen and his story. I wasn't one to watch the ITV drama and haven't got much of a fascination towards crime documentaries. In fact, due to how some people I used to know watched these documentaries as some sort of religion, I have tended to make it my mission to avoid these types of films. However, I think that in some ways this has given me a clean slate to work on, so that there was no previous judgements as to what I was going to read. Sometimes this was good and sometimes it seemed like my naivety struck me down like a fly.

First of all, I would like to put a disclaimer out there who are generally struck down by queasiness very easily, this is not a book for the faint-hearted. There are some themes that are extremely disturbing that even I had to put it down more than one time. On the contrary, even though there are explicit details not only about his early life to the time when he made his first kill, I found that the second half was more interesting than the first, due to his wide details about his incarceration. 

What I found most interesting was the prison system that he was under and how this changed as time progressed. How the press had replaced that form of entertainment that onlookers once had for the death penalty, was glorified through the pages of the newspaper, with Nilsen's comments about how the facts that were brought to attention, did not always have truth to them. This is a fascinating point about how we are consuming the news and even now, it seems, there may be more fiction than fact in order to bring about entertainment to the masses.

However, the thing that shocked me the most was how at home he was in the prison system. How he still knew about events happening in the world and how he was reading the news and watching the tv like the rest of us. It really brings about some questions about how our justice system works and how this compares to other countries in terms of what they want to do to their prisoners.

I feel like this piece is not going to stray from my mind anytime soon, the good and the bad and maybe has made me re-evaluate society in terms of how it works and my own place in it.

RATING: *** (THREE STARS)

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