The Edgier Waters of the Era: Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son

Abstract

In an article written for The Guardian concerning Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, a novel about the state of Utah’s execution of Gary Gilmore, Gordon Burn describes the origins of his own novel about crime, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son (2004[1984]), which focuses on the Yorkshire Ripper:

Instead of being repelled by it, as I should have been, I found, instead, that I wanted to draw closer. On January 2 1981 I was on the final pages of The Executioner’s Song, which I had read at a gallop. Around tea-time it came on the television that they had arrested a man in Sheffield in connection with the Yorkshire Ripper murders. Forty-eight hours later I was in the bar of the Norfolk Gardens Hotel in Bradford listening to claim and counter-claim about who had ‘got his chequebook out’ for Peter Sutcliffe’s father or ‘locked up’ the brother, making notes towards Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, a book for which Norman Mailer would generously volunteer a quote when it was published in America. (Burn 2004)

With the West case, I had everything: I had access to their belongings, to the police interviews — everything, basically, that you could possibly wish to get — and you spend three years writing a book, and you still don’t know what made these two people do the kind of things they did. (Lea 2009)