Written In Cold Blood: The Phenomenology of Murder

By

Gary Lachman

In January, 1966, the British author Colin Wilson sat in the Brooklyn
Heights flat of the novelist Norman Mailer, looking out over the East River and
drinking an orange juice, while chatting with his host about a number of things:
advances, literary agents, dogs, and the virtues of a recent work by another
American novelist, Truman Capote. The work in question was In Cold Blood¸
Capote’s “non-fiction” novel about the brutal slaying of four members of the
Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959. The book had just come out and as
Wilson recounts in his autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose, he had been
looking forward to reading it, “hoping for a Crime and Punishment.” He was,
however, disappointed.

Wilson had arrived at Mailer’s flat through the courtesy of a friend, with
whom he was staying in Brooklyn while on a lecture tour of the states. The
friend knew Mailer, and when Wilson expressed an interest in meeting him, he
gave him Mailer’s telephone number. Wilson recalled that Mailer had a “tough
voice with a Brooklyn accent,” but that although over the telephone he
“sounded like a nightclub bouncer,” he was surprised to find that in person
Mailer was “intelligent and sensitive.”1 The two seemed to get along, although
they differed on their opinion of the book Wilson was reading.

What had disappointed Wilson about Capote’s book? “This commonplace

murder by two commonplace thugs,” as Wilson described it, struck him as
lacking “in any quality of interest.”2 There was only one point in the book
where Wilson felt it “came alive.” This was toward the end when, awaiting
execution, Perry Smith (he and his accomplice Richard Hickock had been easily
caught through the help of ex-cell mate), developed an interest in “philosophy.”

1
Smith was the more intelligent of the two and Wilson believed that the reality of
his approaching execution served as a kind of shock, waking Smith up, sadly
too late, to the possibilities of life that he had thrown away.

Smith’s Death Row revelation – the two were hanged in 1965 - reminded
Wilson of a remark by Dr Johnson that Wilson was fond of quoting. “When a
man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” the eminent Dr opined, “it
concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Wilson’s gloss on Dr Johnson’s insight
was that “if Perry Smith had tried concentrating his mind before he killed the
Clutters, he would not have ended on the gallows.”3

Wilson also thought that Capote’s prose was “undistinguished.” Mailer

disagreed; he thought the book was “a very fine novel,” and read from a passage
in which Capote mentions the “violet-tinted glass” of a mirror in a room the
killers shared in a cheap boarding house. This, Mailer believed, showed
“brilliant observation.” Wilson, like Mailer not shy of controversial remarks,
replied that this was “just the kind of thing a queer would notice,” at which
Mailer laughed.

Oddly enough, by the time Wilson wrote about this encounter in

Dreaming to Some Purpose, his opinion of In Cold Blood had changed. In
retrospect, he said, he had come to “greatly admire the novel.” Mailer’s opinion
of it had also apparently changed somewhere along the line. In an interview in
1980 Capote remarked that Mailer had said that the book displayed “a failure of
the imagination.” Capote countered by declaring that Mailer had “no talent.
None, none, none!”4 There is no record, as far as I know, of Capote’s or
Mailer’s opinion of Wilson’s work.

Oddly enough, Mailer submitted his own entry in the “non-fiction” novel
genre with his own account of a murderer. The Executioner’s Song recounts the

2
events leading up to the execution of Gary Gilmore in 1977 for the pointless
slaying of a gas station attendant and a motel manager; in both cases Gilmore
stole money he did not need. Gilmore had been in jail for most of his life and
the murders took place shortly after he had been released on parole. He drew
national attention when he demanded that the death sentence meted out to him
by the state of Utah for these slayings be carried out, rejecting the efforts of his
family and the American Civil Liberties Union to have the sentence reduced to
life imprisonment. The Executioner’s Song, based on interviews with Gilmore’s
family and friends, as well as those of the victims, won a Pulitzer Prize and, like
In Cold Blood, was made into a film. Gilmore shared in this success, and at the
time of his death, he was actually a rich man.

I should point out that Mailer’s other encounter with a convicted killer
was less successful. While writing The Executioner’s Song, Mailer received a
letter from a 35 year old convict named Jack Henry Abbot who, like Gilmore,
had spent most of his life in jail for a number of violent crimes. As had Perry
Smith, while in jail, Abbot became interested in philosophy, read Marx, and
declared himself a Marxist. How much this concentrated his mind is debatable.
Abbott’s letters to Mailer convinced the novelist that Abbot had literary talent;
they also convinced the publisher Random House, who published a collection of
these letters under the title In the Belly of the Beast ; it became a best-seller.

Mailer was also able to convince the authorities that Abbott was a
“powerful and important American writer” and should be released on parole.
Abbott was. For a brief time he worked as a researcher for Mailer. But sudden
celebrity after decades of imprisonment was apparently too much for Abbott.

Abbott’s book is about the “high esteem we naturally have for violence.”
It is what “makes us” – murderers like Abbott –“effective…Dangerous killers

3
who act alone and without emotion, who act with calculation and principles
with acts of violence…”5 Abbott must have been taken in by his own rhetoric.
Not long after his parole, in the early hours of 18 July 1981, Abbott got into an
argument with a waiter at the Bini Bon café on 2nd Avenue in New York’s East
Village, about using a rest room, which ended in him stabbing Richard Adan,
the waiter, to death. Abbott was eventually captured a few months later in
Louisiana where he was working as a day labourer. In 1992 he hanged himself
in his cell in Buffalo, New York.

Wilson met Mailer again sometime in the 1980s - when Mailer was in
London to promote his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance – and he asked Mailer if
he felt he had made a mistake in securing Abbott’s release. Mailer said no, and
remarked that Abbott could have gone on to become a fine writer. Yet during
Abbott’s trial for the murder of Richard Adan, someone in the court room
shouted at Mailer that he “should hang his head in shame.”6 Mailer summed up
the general assessment of the sad affair when he remarked that it “was such a
waste all around.”7 This, more or less, can serve as a heading for the careers of
most individuals who share Abbott’s “high esteem” for violence.

Wilson’s interest in crime began at an early age. In the foreword to his

father’s Mammoth Book of Murder – a compendium drawn from Wilson’s many
writings on crime – his son, Damon Wilson, writes that it started when his
grandfather brought home a copy of The Fifty Most Amazing Crimes in the Last
Hundred Years, edited by J M Parrish and John R Crossland, and published in
1936.8 Colin and his brother were told that they should never look at the book
and so naturally every chance they could they did. Although at first his
attraction was prompted by the morbid fascination young people have in the
shocking and sensational – and which remains the motivation for most readers
of “true crime” – Wilson’s interest became more serious. The book was filled

4
with accounts of famous criminals, such as Charlie Peace, Landru, Crippen, but
the one that fascinated Wilson the most was the entry on Jack the Ripper, who
terrorised London’s East End in the fall of 1888, and whose identity was never
established. Where the other entries sported a picture of the criminal, for the
Ripper there was only a black question mark. Wilson would later spend a great
amount of time and ink trying to fill in that blank, and he is credited with
coining the term “Ripperology,” for the study of the murders.

Wilson’s early fascination with the Ripper slayings eventually led to his
first novel, Ritual in the Dark, published in 1961, and which is best described as
“Jack the Ripper meets the Brothers Karamazov in post-war duffle-coated
London.” Famously he wrote it in the Reading Room of the British Museum by
day, while spending his nights in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath. When he
moved to London from Leicester in 1951, Wilson researched the novel by
cycling around the murder sites. The Brothers Karamazov bit of my gloss
comes from three characters in the novel who symbolise for Wilson respectively
the three elements of the human being that need to be integrated in order to
achieve a more intense state of consciousness: the body, the emotions, and the
intellect. In the brothers Mitya, Alyosha, and Ivan, Dostoyevsky, whose work is
not lacking in murders, laid the ground work for Wilson’s characterological
triad.

Consciousness and its peculiarities became a lifelong obsession for

Wilson; his “project,” if we can call it this, was to develop a means of achieving
the “concentration of the mind” that Dr Johnson referred to, without the
expedient of a noose.9 In pursuit of this Wilson wrote an enormous amount in a
wide range of subjects: philosophy, psychology, literature, sex, the occult,
parapsychology, mysticism, and also produced several novels. Wilson’s central
insight into what he calls “the paradoxical nature of freedom” – our inveterate
habit of de-valuing our freedom when we have it and truly appreciating its

5
“reality” only when it is threatened – is that crisis can lower our “indifference
threshold,” the psychological quirk that leads us to take our freedom “for
granted”.10 We can say that Wilson wanted to find a means of throwing off our
indifference without the need of crisis.

This, in fact, was the true reason behind his study of murder. As he writes
in A Casebook of Murder, published only a few years after his meeting with
Mailer, and where he first mentions In Cold Blood: “The emotional shallowness
that made the murders [of the Clutters] possible vanished in the face of death. If
it had happened earlier, the murders would never have happened.”11

This phenomenon of what we might call “existential awakening” raises,

for Wilson, an “interesting question for sociologists and psychologists,” and
underlies “the real purpose of the study of murder: to teach the human
imagination to create crisis situations without the physical need to act them
out.”12 I might also point out that Wilson mentions that Capote had originally
planned to use another murder case, involving lesbianism, child murder and
mutilation, as the basis for his “non-fiction” novel, but that, as Wilson writes, it
is “hard to see how such a novel could have been bearable for the sexually
normal reader,” and so it is no surprise that Capote thought otherwise.13 One
supposes that the lack of sexually motivated violence in the case of Smith and
Hickock (although Hickock had a history of paedophilia) and which runs
through much of Wilson’s account of murder in the twentieth century, led him
to consider their crimes “commonplace.”

Wilson’s interest in the existential analysis of murder – its

phenomenology – gave birth to a number of works dedicated to understanding
the psychology of crime. Some of these, such as Encyclopaedia of Murder, the
first of its kind, co-authored with Pat Pitman; Order of Assassins; and the
exhaustive A Criminal History of Mankind, with its Wellsian scope and breadth,
are serious, highly readable explorations into the psyche of the criminal and the

6
motivations behind his (or her) acts. His history of forensic science, Written in
Blood – which earned him the tag of being “the Diderot of the path labs” by the
writer Iain Sinclair, himself a devotee of the Ripper (see his novel Whitechapel,
Scarlet Tracings) - is less focused on the psychology of crime than on the
development of the means of fighting it. Later compendiums, such as the above
mentioned Mammoth Book of Murder and the like, written for the most part to
tackle the difficult challenge of making a living as a writer, are more “pulpy”
and “sensational,” and, for some readers, may seem too redolent of gore and
sexual perversion. Yet in aim and effect they are essentially the same as his
more phenomenological works: they serve as the “imaginative crises” that can
wake the reader up to the value of life to which he or she has become
“indifferent” to only a lesser degree than the likes Smith, Hickock, Gilmore,
and Abbott. We all fall within our respective “indifference thresholds” and we
all require some shock – some of us more, some less - to shake us out of them.

Wilson’s first attempt to spell out the existential motivation for his
analysis of murder appeared in his essay “The Study or Murder” which opens
his and Pitman’s Encyclopaedia of Murder. It remains a powerful statement of
the fact that we, the law-abiding, book-reading public, differ from the criminals
we read about not in kind, but only to the extent that our own de-valuing of life
has not reached the utter nihilism that it has with them. From the perspective of
Wilson’s “outsider,” the individual who “sees too deep and too much” and is
aware of the chaos and contingency behind life’s surface consistency, “All our
values are makeshift.” The only difference between us and the murderer is that
“the murderer simply goes further than most people in substituting his own
convenience for absolute values.”14 What concerns Wilson throughout his
analysis is the essential triviality of most of the crimes he studies. In the case of
Smith and Hickock, what they gained from the murder of four people, besides

7
their own deaths, was “between forty and fifty dollars.”15 That amounted to “ten
dollars a life.”16

Wilson contrasts this casual absolute cheapening of human existence with

the absolute affirmation that Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov knows in Crime and
Punishment when he contemplates his utter extinction. Faced with the prospect
of annihilation, Raskolnikov would prefer to spend eternity on a “narrow ledge”
surrounded by “everlasting” darkness, solitude, and tempest, rather than accept
death.17 We for the most part occupy a middle ground between this absolute Yes
or No; yet, if not a crime, our tepid awareness of the real value of life is
certainly a misdemeanour. The bland complacency that informs most of our
existence is the backdrop to the criminal’s more active moral nihilism. But if, as
another character facing extinction grasped, “it would have been easy to be a
saint,” in his case sadly too late, the fact that we are not saints is evidence
enough of our guilt.18 The criminal merely takes this road to perdition to its end,
more times than not bringing along some others with him.

Wilson developed several ideas about the psychology of murder that

informed his later writings on crime. He came to see that the type of murder
typical of an era changed over time, and that this change seemed to align very
neatly with the notion of the “hierarchy of needs” of the psychologist Abraham
Maslow.19 Maslow, known as the “father of humanistic psychology,” observed
that human psychology seems to follow a certain trajectory, determined by the
satisfaction of certain needs. We have a fundamental need for food and drink.
When that is satisfied the need for shelter, a home, becomes paramount.
Establishing this, the need for companionship, relationship, love of some kind
arises. Satisfying this, the need for self-esteem, to be thought well of by our
peers, becomes essential. These levels of the hierarchy Maslow refers to as
“deficiency needs;” they concern something we lack. The next level is of what
he calls “being needs,” needs that arise from something we have. These are

8
creative needs, the need to express ourselves in some satisfying work, the need
to know and to experience what Maslow called “self-actualisation,” the
actualising of our potential.

In his “criminal history of mankind,” Wilson saw that the earliest murders
were those motivated by the most basic need: for sustenance. Aside from
exceptions like Gilles de Rais or some of the Roman emperors, whom we can
see as “sports” in the evolution of crime, exhibiting the kind of behaviour that
would sadly become more commonplace in the future, for most of history,
crime was committed for this most basic need. Wilson noticed, however, that by
the mid-nineteenth century the “domestic murder,” murder committed to secure
a home or business, became common. Jack the Ripper inaugurated the age of
“sex crime,” which we can see as a curdled expression of Maslow’s need for
love. The second half of the twentieth century brought on the “self-esteem”
murder, individuals who kill in order to become “famous,” to “be somebody” to
get into the papers and on TV. Our current era has seen the rise of the
“motiveless murder,” the “gratuitous act,” a distorted gesture of “freedom” that
can be seen as an expression of frustrated creativity.20

From this perspective, we can see that Smith and Hickock’s crime seems
a throwback to the age of footpads and highwaymen. It was “commonplace,” on
the lowest level of the hierarchy. Their motivation was money. And although
Hickock intended to rape teen age Nancy Clutter but was stopped by Smith,
who was something of a prude, this was an afterthought, an attempt to take
advantage of an opportunity, not the initial aim. Yet if the crime itself, horrific
as it was, is banal, the relationship between the two killers and their respective
psychologies, can be viewed through some of the other lenses Wilson used in
his phenomenology of murder.

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 Wilson points out that in crimes involving a pair, one is usually more
dominant than the other; the classic example of this is the murder in 1924 of
Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.21 In our case, of the two,
Hickock seems the dominant one. Smith, who actually pulled the trigger on the
Clutters, was ironically more gentle; he had a dreamy, feminine character, and
spoke in a prim, “correct” voice. Smith wrote poetry, played guitar and sang,
and day dreamed of becoming a famous performer, wowing audiences at Las
Vegas.22 He was an “incessant conceiver of voyages,” fantasizing about finding
sunken treasure, and carried around with him a box crammed with “books and
maps and songs, poems and old letters…”23

Hickock was much more down to earth and practical and out for the main
chance. He could be charming when necessary – both were adept at concealing
their true feelings and Hickock was a “confidence man” – but he was in essence
coarse and vulgar. If Smith had met with his “mentor”, Willie-Jay, a prison
mate he was hoping to find in Kansas, whose intelligence and insight he
respected, the murders would not have taken place. Hickock had the plan and
the drive and his assertive buoyancy kept them both afloat, at least for a while.

Like Smith, Hickock had “above average intelligence.”24 Both fit

Wilson’s “high I.Q. killer” identikit, individuals who are more intelligent than
their fellows, but not intelligent and disciplined enough to use their intelligence
to their advantage. They develop a smouldering resentment at “society” for
denying them the success and achievement they feel they deserve and nurse a
nagging envy of those who enjoy what is denied them. Wilson’s classic
example of this is Charles Manson, whose crimes, a decade after Smith and
Hickock’s, put an end to the “love and peace” of the 1960s. Manson, like Smith,
fancied himself a performer and even recorded some of his music with the
Beach Boys.25 Smith never got that far, but, like Manson, he considered himself
“exceptional, rare, artistic,” and apparently possessed a “high degree of ESP.”26

10
 Where Smith has a strange, brooding, “static” character, Hickock was
impulsive, unable to bear frustration, and was given to boasting and bragging.
In several ways he conforms to the psychological profile of the “right man” or
“violent man,” a notion Wilson borrowed from the science fiction writer A.E.
Van Vogt.27 The “right man” will never admit to being wrong and will resort to
violence if his self-esteem is challenged. Smith had more than a touch of this;
Willie-Jay told him that his problem was “explosive emotional reaction out of
all proportion to the occasion.”28 Both took offense easily. Hickock maintained
a precarious grip on his self-esteem by bullying and swindling practically
everyone around him. He possessed an “erratic control over aggressive
impulses,” and his greatest kick came from dominating others: “The glory of
having everybody at his mercy, that’s what excited him.”29 When it became
clear that there was no money in the house, as Hickock believed, he
compensated himself for the loss – both of the cash and of face – by egging
Smith on to kill the Clutters.

Smith, who prevented Hickock from raping the daughter, made sure the
others were comfortable before he killed them. He seems to have shot them in a
kind of dreamlike, almost somnambulistic state. The dreams he had of the
“good life” in Mexico or some other exotic locale, dissolved into the
recognition that he had reached a nadir, crawling on the floor of Nancy’s
bedroom, searching for her silver dollar. Both Smith and Hickock evidenced
what Wilson calls “magical thinking,” a kind of absurd logic and rationalisation
that allows characters of this sort to keep reality at bay, while propping up their
fantasies with heavy doses of self-pity. In the long run, provided they live long
enough, their animus against “the world” or “society” or other abstractions can
be redirected, through a painful awakening, toward its true target: themselves.

Smith seemed to have a sense of what was wrong with him, which
Hickock seemed to lack. To a psychiatrist who interviewed him in order to

11
establish his sanity, Smith said: “I have always felt a remarkable exhilaration
being among people with a purpose and sense of dedication to carry out that
purpose.”30 Hickock seemed not to have this insight into this central problem,
the lack of purpose; or if he did, he lacked the vocabulary or incentive to
articulate it. Smith idealised people who seemed able to stick with something
and carry it through; this was in part the source of his admiration for Willie-Jay
who, having achieved his own salvation, avoided Smith outside the big house,
perhaps intuiting that he would not achieve his. Aimless drift characterised
much of Smith’s and Hickock’s lives. Smith had talent but lacked the staying
power needed to go through the difficult, demanding steps that could secure any
reward for it. (And of course, there are no guarantees that even with this, he
would have achieved it; life is unfair.) Both exemplified Wilson’s definition of
crime as the decision to take a “short cut” and grab what you feel you deserve
without paying for it. Resentment and self-pity rationalises this as a “blow
against the system.”

While in their case, and the case of most of the murderers Wilson studied,
this lack of purpose reached disastrous levels, it is again something that
differentiates us from them only by degree, not kind. In our own way, we drift
through life, occupied with trivialities, only knowing the kind of affirmation, the
sudden indubitable grasp of life’s absolute value that Dostoyevsky knew, in rare
moments, if at all. It was for this reason that the philosopher Heidegger and the
esoteric teacher Gurdjieff reached the same conclusion: that what was needed to
free us from our “forgetfulness of being” was a vivid, visceral awareness of our
unavoidable death, a form of the “imaginative crisis” Wilson prescribed.

Wilson tried his own hand at a “non-fiction” novel, conceived in order to

elicit that crisis and to place the psyche of a killer under his phenomenological
microscope. Lingard, published in 1970, is not a pleasant read, although it feels

12
more of a work of fiction than In Cold Blood, which struck me throughout as
gripping reportage. Where Capote’s and Mailer’s killers were responsible for
six deaths among them, the “real life” murderers Wilson uses as his models
were tragically more enterprising.

Wilson based his character, Arthur Lingard, on the careers of several

killers: Peter Manuel, the Düsseldorf maniac Peter Kürten, the sex-murderer
William Heirens, who terrorised Chicago, and the Dutch murder Hans Van Zon.
To tally up the dead among them would be too gruesome, but I can assure the
reader it is a considerable number. In a note about the book, Wilson remarks
that Capote’s “talk of a ‘non-fiction’ novel was a red herring.”31 For Wilson at
this point – his appreciation of the work had yet to change – In Cold Blood was
“fundamentally no different from novelised nonfiction,” and he offers René
Fülöp-Miller’s “biography” of Rasputin as an example; Wilson himself had
written his own biography of the “holy devil,” Rasputin and the Fall of the
Romanovs. Nevertheless, Wilson “still felt that a genuine nonfiction novel
should be possible,” and Lingard was his attempt at it. The exact difference
between “novelised nonfiction” and a “non-fiction novel” he does not make
clear.

Wilson’s nonfiction novel traces the progress of a prison psychiatrist as

he gradually realises that the catatonic prisoner in his care is “The most
dangerous criminal I ever met,” with a string of vicious, violent sex murders
behind him.32 The book is filled with accounts of the killer’s squalid childhood,
made up of incest, fetishism, violence, and petty crime. It requires, I think, some
imaginative stamina to ingest the details Wilson provides in order to supply the
reader with the “imaginative crises” needed to break down his “indifference
threshold.” The material will be familiar to readers of his Origins of the Sexual
Impulse and The Misfits, both of which focus on the phenomenon of sexual
perversion. It is his most uncompromising imaginative attempt to portray the

13
relationship between crime and creative frustration, to make fiction out of
William Blake’s prescient insight – predating Freud by nearly a century – that
“When thought is closed in caves, then love will show its roots in deepest hell.”

I will leave to the reader the pleasure or distress of reading Wilson’s own
non-fiction novel, and close with Wilson’s reflection on the last words of the
American gangster Charley Birger, who, like Smith and Hickock, met his end
on the gallows. “It is a beautiful world, isn’t it?” Birger said, before the trap
door opened. Like Raskolnikov, Birger had seen the absolute value of life, but
for him this vision came too late. And for us? As Wilson writes: “We deny this
freedom during every moment of our lives, except in brief flashes of vision. But
is by far the most interesting possibility that human beings possess… Murder
interests me because it is the most extreme form of the denial of this human
potentiality.”33

Works Cited

Capote, Truman (2000) In Cold Blood. London: Penguin Modern

Classics.

Mailer, Norman (1957) The White Negro retrieved from:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/20cusliterature/
syllabus2015-16/norman_mailer_-_the_white_negro.pdf

--------- (1979) The Executioner’s Song. New York: Little, Brown.

Lachman, Gary (2003) Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the
Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius. New York: Disinformation Co.

Maslow, Abraham (1996) Future Visions. London: Sage Publications.

Wilson, Colin and Pitman, Pat (1961) Encyclopaedia of Murder. London:

Arthur Baker.

14
 --------- (1962) Ritual in the Dark. London: Pan Books.

--------- (1969) A Casebook of Murder. New York: Cowles Book

Company.

--------- (1970) Lingard. New York: Crown Publishers.

--------- and Seaman, Donald (1989) Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder.

London: Pan Books.

--------- (1993) A Criminal History of Mankind. London: Diamond Books.

--------- (2000) The Mammoth Book of Murder. London: Robinson

Publishing Ltd

--------- (2004) Dreaming to Some Purpose. London: Century.

--------- (2015) The Occult. London: Watkins Publishing

--------- (2016) The Outsider. New York: Tarcher Perigee.

15
1
Colin Wilson Dreaming to Some Purpose (London: Century, 2004) p. 247
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid. A writer who shared Wilson’s belief that use of the mind is a powerful means of rehabilitation was Arthur Koestler,
who spent time behind bars in Spain – where he awaited execution - France, and England. In 1962 Koestler established the
Koestler Award, which provides monetary rewards for creative achievement while in prison.
https://www.koestlerarts.org.uk/
4
https://nymag.com/arts/books/features/26285/
5
Quoted in Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder (London: Pan Books, 1989) p. 20.
6
Wilson and Seaman p. 20.
7
Ibid. It should not be surprising that Mailer should find creative vitality in characters like Abbott. In his essay “The White
Negro” (1957), Mailer celebrates as the acme of “hip” the very violence that Abbott, Gilmore, Smith, Hickock and many
others displayed as a way of life – or death. Among other random acts of criminality, in the essay Mailer justifies the
murder of a “candy store keeper” by “two strong eighteen year old hoodlums,” because they are not murdering “a weak,
fifty year old man, but an institution.” He advocates the need to “divorce oneself from society” and to accede to the
“rebellious imperatives of the self,” something that those named above excelled in.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/20cusliterature/syllabus2015-16/
norman_mailer_-_the_white_negro.pdf
8
Damon Wilson, foreword Colin Wilson The Mammoth Book of Murder (London: Robinson Publishing Ltd, 2000) p. xvi.
9
In The Outsider, Wilson’s first book and the one that hurled him into a soon unwanted celebrity, these three parts of the
human being are represented by Vaslav Nijinsky (body), Vincent Van Gogh (emotions), and T. E. Lawrence (intellect). In
this, as mentioned, Wilson is following the lead provided by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. In Ritual in the Dark
these parts are played by Austin Nunne – who is a sex killer – the painter Oliver Glasp, and Gerard Sorme, Wilson’s alter-
ego, who also appears in two later novels, Man without a Shadow (originally published as The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme,
and The God of the Labyrinth.
10
Colin Wilson The Occult (London: Watkins Publishing, 2015) p. xxiii.
11
Colin Wilson) p. 226. `
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid. pp 225-26.
14
Colin Wilson and Pat Pitman Encyclopaedia of Murder (London: Arthur Baker, 1961) p. .25.
15
Truman Capote In Cold Blood (London: Penguin Books, 2000) p. 239.
16
Ibid.
17
Wilson and Pitman p. 25.
18
Graham Greene’s “whiskey priest” in The Power and the Glory. Greene, too, knew the total affirmation of life in the face
of imminent death when, as a bored teenager, he played Russia roulette with his brother’s revolver. Ibid. p. 27.
19
Abraham Maslow Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow ed. Edward Hoffman (London: Sage
Publications Ltd, 1996) pp. 9-10.
20
Colin Wilson A Criminal History of Mankind (London: Diamond Books, 1993) pp. 14-16.
21
Wilson 1969 pp. 220-21.
22
Capote p. 14.
23
Ibid. p. 13.
24
Ibid. p.286.
25
Gary Lachman Turn Off Your Mind (New York: Disinformation Co., 2003) p. 325.
26
Ibid. p. 43, 86.
27
Wilson 1993 pp. 64-75.
28
Capote p. 43
29
Ibid. p. 232.
30
Ibid. p. 265.
31
Colin Wilson Lingard (New York: Crown Publishers, 1970) p. 278. The UK edition, The Killer (London: New English Library,
1970), is an considerably edited version of the US edition.
32
Ibid. p. 5
33
Wilson 1969 p. 22.