Brian Lane, The Butchers Reviews

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Good Points: A good introduction to a lot of the past's most gruesome killers. Makes a good piece of reference material. Includes some of the more obscure killers.

Bad Points: Not much information on each individual killer.

General comments: Brian Lane, The Butchers - Synopsis:
"The Butchers covers more than thirty cases of cold-blooded killers who compounded their original crimes of murder with deliberate and macabre mutilations. From Catherine Haynes who set a trend in dismemberment in 1726 when she hacked off her husband's head and tossed it into the Thames, to Dennis Nilsen who was doing much the same to his victims in 1983; from Marcel Petiot's quicklime pits in Occupied Paris, to New York's infamous Albert 'The Cannibal' Fish. However meticulous and ingenious, none of them got away with murder. And, as this fascinating book shows, only painstaking investigation and forensics led to the final unmasking of the sadists and psychotics who sought such bloody concealment of their crimes".

The Butchers offers up a huge list of killers from the past, delivering a brief overview of their crimes and their eventual capture and punishment. Brian Lane manages to cram in loads of individual cases and killers, creating a great introduction for anyone interested in the subject matter. Obviously, the amount of detail is extremely limited for the facts on each case, so the book is purely for the purpose of an introduction our reference material.

The killers that are documented are:
John George Haigh
Maitre Georges Sarret
John White Webster
Henri Desire Landru
Patrick Mahon
Alfred Arthur Rouse
Kurt Erich Tetzner
Ernest Elmes
Albert Fish
Ed Gein
Georg Karl Grossmann
Fritz Haarmann
Catherine Hayes
Pierre Voirbo
Belle Gunness
Louis Voisin
James M'Kay
Dr. Buck Ruxton
Brian Donald Hume
Reginald Dudley & Robert Maynard
Dennis Andrew Nilsen
Nicholas Boyce
Suchnam Singh Sandhu
John Bowden
Arthur & Nizamodeen Hosein
John Lawrence David
Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen
Harry Dobkin
Dr. Marcel Petiot
James Camb
Peter Hogg
Bela Kiss
Hera Bessarabo

The book runs for a total of 314 pages and includes some black & white illustration photo pages. The book does cover some of the more unheard of killers, but again, there are only brief descriptions of their crimes. If the book is read from start to finish, you will find you will get desensitized to the horrific crimes quite quickly, due to the sheer amount of cases that are described in such little room.

Personally, I'm not fond of these types of true crime books as I like to find out a lot about the individuals and be able to analyse their crimes. This type of documentation does not allow this, it merely offers a brief reference to each killer.

The book was first published in 1991 by W.H. Allen & Co PLC.