Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection
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Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection (1968) (1974 paperback: ISBN 0-06-060775-0 ) is a semi-fictionalized account of the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, by the Welsh author and playwright, Emlyn Williams.
First published in 1968, two years after the Moors murderers were sentenced to life imprisonment, the book is a mixture of reportage, speculation, literary allusions, and Joycean stream-of-consciousness, with phonetically rendered dialogue to reflect the heavy regional accents and speech idioms of the working class milieu in Manchester and Glasgow. Williams also makes use of interior monologues to suggest possible explanations as to the killers' motives and their state of mind leading up to their crimes.
The book has much in common with the literary genre known as New Journalism since it narrates an actual murder case through the author's own creative interpretation and idiosyncratic style. In this sense, Beyond Belief bears a strong resemblance to Truman Capote's celebrated "nonfiction novel", In Cold Blood.
However, as a work of literature, critics have not held Emlyn Williams' book in the same high esteem as Capote's. Indeed, the book seems to have fallen out of favor due to the fact that many of Williams' speculations have since been disproven as new facts about the case have come to light in the decades following its original publication.
What's more, Williams' florid prose style, questionable characterizations, and frequent discretionary editorializations on the events (both proven and alleged) now seem highly speculative and rather quaint and dated. The fact that the author had minimal contact with most of the individuals involved in the case, and had therefore seen fit to invent fictitious scenes and dialogue and embellish certain details to account for what was not known at the time, has also been a source of criticism.
Beyond Belief was a bestseller in Britain in the years following its publication. It has been reported that Myra Hindley strongly objected to Emlyn Williams' account of her relationship with Ian Brady, and that during the early years of her sentence, she implored friends and family not to read the book.
The book is mentioned by the character Amyl Nitrate (played by Jordan) at beginng of Derek Jarman's punk-themed cult movie, Jubilee (1977). It was also the source for much of the detail mentioned in the song, "Suffer Little Children" (1984), by the Manchester pop group, the Smiths.
