![]() ![]() In May 1840, Lord William Russell was found dead in bed at his house in Mayfair, London: his throat had been cut so deeply that his head was almost severed. Still, stories of this kind keep cropping up (in a lurid variation, the Chinese crime writer Liu Yongbiao was recently sentenced to death for committing murders that inspired novels he wrote years later), and it turns out they’re nothing new. Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Anne Rice and Bret Easton Ellis all faced accusations of writing novels that caused copycat crimes. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was thought (by the FBI) to have been inspired by Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. ![]() Can they also inspire killers? Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon, was carrying a copy of The Catcher in the Rye when arrested. A s Leonard Bast discovers in Howards End when a heavy shelf collapses on him, books can kill. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |