A Bit of Ginger 
Theo Tait
Gordon Burn’s work takes place at a point where fact and fiction, public events and private lives, fame and death all meet. He began his career as a proponent of the non-fiction novel pioneered by Truman Capote and Norman Mailer; his first book, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (1984), was a painstaking re-creation of the life of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He topped that with an account of Fred and Rosemary West’s killing careers, Happy like Murderers (1998). The first resembles a documentary; the second is more like a novel in the sense of being more artfully shaped and occasionally straying from the record to speculate about things the writer can’t know. But both are horribly illuminating about the home life of a serial killer, and about England’s recent past.
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Other articles by this contributor:
Vicious Poke in the Eye · Theo Tait feels Naipaul’s fury
Feral Hippies · Peter Carey goes astray
Rutrutrutrutrutrutrutrut · Tom Wolfe’s Bloody Awful Novel
Gorilla with Mobile Phone · Michel Houellebecq
Flame-Broiled Whopper · Salman Rushdie
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