One-Line Summary
Brian Masters opens Killing for Company with the calm precision of an academic stepping into a crime scene.
Opening Impression
His prose is restrained, deliberate, and disturbingly intimate. Where lesser writers reach for shock, Masters reaches for comprehension. Within a few pages it’s clear this is not another serial-killer exposé but a psychological autopsy of one of Britain’s most perplexing murderers. Writing from proximity—interviewing Dennis Nilsen in prison, reading his diaries, and corresponding with him extensively—Masters generates a quiet menace. He never excuses or sensationalises; instead, he dissects the moral and emotional void that turned Nilsen’s loneliness into annihilation. The opening establishes a tone of forensic empathy, as though understanding might be the last tool left for confronting evil.
Synopsis
The book reconstructs Nilsen’s life from an isolated Scottish childhood to his arrest in 1983 after human remains were found blocking a London drain. Masters traces how longing for affection hardened into possession, and possession into murder. Over five years Nilsen killed at least a dozen men—often drifters or job-seekers—luring them home, killing them after drink-filled evenings, and keeping their bodies close in a grotesque imitation of companionship. Rather than dwell on gore, Masters frames the crimes through police testimony, psychological evaluation, and Nilsen’s own reflections, exploring how charisma, routine, and delusion masked pathology. Each chapter layers cause and effect: a boy’s unresolved grief becomes a man’s fatal need for control. The structure is chronological, reading like a study in emotional entropy.
Analysis
Structure: Linear biography interwoven with psychological commentary; police reconstruction alternates with reflective essays, balancing fact and theory.
Characterisation: Nilsen is rendered not as a caricatured monster but as an articulate narcissist—intelligent, self-absorbed, terrified of abandonment. Victims remain present via compassionately handled glimpses of their lives, preventing voyeurism.
Style & Voice: Measured, formal, almost judicial. Masters writes with moral gravity rather than sensational rhythm, allowing empathy and disgust to coexist on the page.
Themes: Loneliness, repression, moral blindness; the social invisibility of the vanished; the policing of homosexuality in late-20th-century Britain; the fragile boundary between need and nihilism.
Verdict
Killing for Company remains definitive British true crime because it refuses to perform outrage. Masters transforms the serial-killer narrative into a meditation on solitude, responsibility, and the psychology of evil. By treating Nilsen as both subject and mirror, he forces readers to recognise how emotional vacancy can fester within ordinary lives. Anchored in primary evidence and moral inquiry, this is grim, humane, and intellectually exacting: a study not of death, but of what happens when empathy dies.
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