A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

sharp rebuke. He is making society aware that, somewhere among its anonymous masses, there is
someone who deserves fear and respect...
There is, of course, one major disadvantage that dawns on every master criminal sooner or later. He
can never achieve public recognition - or at least, only at the cost of being caught. He must be
content with the admiration of a very small circle - perhaps, as in the case of Leopold and Loeb,
Brady and Hindley, just one other person. This explains why so many ‘master criminals’ seem to
take a certain pleasure in being caught; they are at last losing their anonymity. Thurneman not only
wrote a confession; he turned it into an autobiography, in which he explained with pride the details
of his crimes. This is the irony of the career of a ‘master criminal’ in that unless he is caught; he
feels at the end the same frustration, the same intolerable sense of non-recognition that drove him
to crime in the first place. It may have been the recognition of this absurd paradox that finally
undermined Thurneman’s sanity.
The Thurneman case illustrates in a particularly clear form the problem that came to fascinate me
as I worked on the Encyclopaedia of Murder and its two successors. Thurneman was convinced he
was acting out of free will, and thus demonstrating his ‘uniqueness’. But to see him as part of a
‘pattern’ of crime implies that he was neither unique nor free. Which is the truth? It only begs the
question to point out that we can also see Shakespeare or Beethoven as part of the historical pattern
of their time, for, as Shaw points out, we judge the artist by his highest moments, the criminal by
his lowest. Creativeness involves a certain mental effort; destructiveness does not.
The question was raised in the 1890s by the sociologist Emile Durkheim in his study of suicide.
Fellow sociologists were doubtful whether suicide could be treated scientifically, since every
suicide has a different reason. Durkheim countered this by pointing out that the rates of suicide in
individual countries are amazingly constant; therefore it cannot depend on individual choice. There
must be hidden laws, underlying causes. Besides, there are quite recognisable patterns. ‘Loners’ kill
themselves more often than people who feel they belong to a group. Free thinkers have a higher
suicide rate than Protestants, Protestants than Catholics, and Catholics than Jews - who, at least in
the 1880s, had the lowest suicide rate of all because Jews have such a powerful sense of social
solidarity.
Durkheim also observed a type of suicide that corresponds roughly to ‘motiveless murder’; he
called it suicide anomique, suicide due to lack of norms or values. Bachelors have a higher suicide
rate than married men. Moreover, during times of war, the suicide rate drops; it rises again in times
of peace and prosperity. (In 1981, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Disorders recorded that
admissions rise during the cease-fires and drop when the shooting starts.) From this, Durkheim
deduced that people need social limits to keep them balanced and sane. Suicide is, therefore, a
‘social act’ not an individual one. He concludes that there are ‘suicidal currents’ in society that act
mechanically on individuals and force a number of them to commit suicide. The same argument
could obviously be applied to crime anomique, the type of crime committed by socially rootless
individuals such as Thurneman, Manson, Brady, Frazier.
The arguments of this chapter have placed us in a position to see precisely where Durkheim was
mistaken. He believed that it is the individual’s social orientation that leads to suicide (or crime - as
we shall see later, there is a close connection). But our study of the relation between crime and
‘hypnosis’ has shown that this fails to get to the heart of the matter. It is true that society provides
norms and values; but these in turn provide a sense of reality, the essential factor in preventing both