Saqi Books

What drives someone to commit the unthinkable? Paul E. Mullen, one of the world’s pre-eminent forensic psychiatrists, examines the complex workings of the lone multiple murderer – a spectre haunting modern societies.

With unflinching clarity, Mullen draws on his decades assessing massacre perpetrators first-hand, bringing readers into a dark landscape populated both by killers who attained the ugly fame they had sought as well as lesser-known but equally chilling cases.

Mullen illuminates the troubling patterns that unite these murderers, such as obsessive rage; personal grievance; fascination with weapons; and yearning for infamy. Their actions are ultimately rooted in their desire for personal destruction, often culminating in suicide. He also considers the impact of media sensationalism on the killers’ grandiose fantasies, often inspiring copycat violence, and proposes steps toward better threat assessment and identification of warning signs.

Challenging myths around madness and violence, Mullen reveals the unsettling truth: lone mass killers are not incomprehensible monsters, but deeply disturbed people shaped by knowable forces that, when properly understood, can be countered effectively.

Harry Silman joined the British army in 1939. As a medicalofficer under bombardment on the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940, he was one of the last soldiers to be shipped out during the mass retreat.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, his division was assigned to assist in the defence of Singapore; they arrived just before the island fell to Japanese forces in 1942. Harry spent the rest of the war in the notorious Changi POW camp and upcountry at Hellfire Pass, where he tended to the wounded and dying men who were forced to labour on the Burma Railway.Throughout, Harry kept diaries – highly secret, illegal, and dangerous for a POW. He managed to write a detailed account of his harrowing experiences in the camps when he himself was weakened and exhausted, caring as best he could for hundreds of desperately ill men. Articulate, graphic, compassionate, and lit with good humour, this is Harry’s war in his own words.

His diaries, arguably one of the most comprehensive surviving contemporaneous accounts of this period of World War Two, have been edited with great care and illuminating commentary by his daughter, Jacqueline Passman.