Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn is a true crime classic, republished to coincide with the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize.
In 2007, Gordon Burn took the extraordinary news headlines from that year, and wove the strands together into an essential story for our time. The characters of these... Læs mere
Winner of the Whitbread Best First Novel of the YearIn his classic debut novel, Gordon Burn takes Britain's biggest selling vocalist of the 1950s and turns her story into an equation of celebrity and murder.
In a forensic dissection of Britain's souring landscape Gordon Burn tells the tale of Ray Cruddas, a light entertainer effecting a semi-dignified retreat from a fading career, who returns to the unnamed northern town of his youth.
In one corner was Barry Hearn and his Romford Mafia - Davis, Taylor and Griffiths - and in the other were the bad boys - Higgins, White and Knowles - threatening the game's good name, and its earning potential.
'Immaculately written, inspiring, sad and elegiac.' Daily TelegraphWith a new introduction by David PeaceDuncan Edwards played his first game for Manchester United at the age of fifteen and Walter Winterbottom, then England manager, called him 'the spirit of British football'.
But as he reports on a series of brutal murders and sex crimes, he's forced to wonder whether he is just a witness - or part of some deeper pattern of cause and effect .
It seemed the case of the notorious Yorkshire Ripper was finally closed when Peter Sutcliffe was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1981. But in the early 1980s, Gordon Burn spent three years living in Sutcliffe's home town of Bingley, researching his life.