I have no interest in serial killers or indeed murder generally. Am I abnormal?

[whataboutbob]

Just getting it off my chest. Any book premised around the deliberate ending of a humans life by another human is a turn off. If the victim is a woman ( and the perpetrator a man), if there’s mutilation, grief porn etc I want to know even less. But judging by TV, radio dramas, bookshops etc I sometimes feel like I’m a misfit. Anyone else want to join me?

@whataboutbob

What a relief, others agree. *@SemperIdem* I so agree about the “ ripper”. I live in London and there’s not one or two but several businesses running “ ripper tours” around the east end. You can read reviews on Tripadvisor. It’s just depressing that so many people want to go and gawp at the places where women were disemboweled and collect all the miserable factoids.

Could you not say the same about places like Auschwitz?

@borntohula, Auschwitz is a non-profit state museum, UNESCO world heritage site, education and research centre, intended to inform visitors about the Holocaust. Former inmates were the first people to go onto the site to start securing it in 1946. For 40 years the director was a camp survivor.

I really don’t think there’s any comparison with for-profit, highly-sensationalised Jack the Ripper tours.

@Stonehopper the point really was the reasons people go there. You think everyone goes because they want to be 'educated?'

I think that if you’re a true crime fan type looking for gruesome details, you’re far less likely to get your kicks at a museum founded by camp survivors whose primary aim is dignified commemoration and education than on a sensationalist tourist attraction that fetishises rape and torture.

I have misgivings about concentration camps as tourist destinations. I can understand them as memorials and people visiting them for that reason, particularly if they had family there, but I think there are others who don't have that motivation. But then you couldn't do some sort of test before people go to see if they have the "right" reasons. For one thing, not everyone would know all their own motivations. I have never been. I might feel differently if I had, I don't know. I suspect if I were in the area, I would go, so probably even I don't quite know what I really think, I can see arguments both ways.

I find with murders, I mostly just never get round to reading them, after I have read the million and one other books I want to read, fiction and non-fiction. I did read an Agatha Christie a couple of Christmases ago at my cousins, because the book was on the shelf of whichever was on TV. When I worked in a lending library, crime was shelved as a genre, and there were readers who who borrowed only from that section.

I do find forensic science interesting though. There was an exhibition at the Wellcome a few years ago about the development of forensic techniques and it was amazing to learn that soil profiles in the UK can be very precise, down to very small areas, things like that. That I find very interesting.

I happily read a lot of pulp, and my dad especially reads all the crime fiction so we share that. I find murder so unimaginative as a fiction crime plot event.

Especially when the murder is quite graphic & overly creative (looking at You, Iain Banks)

One of the best Inspector Rebus stories I read was a short story about burglary, theft & deception. Just those. No murder required.

There should be more fraud & deception in crime fiction, I reckon. A very unexplored enormous mine of material there.

Pedophilia & sexual abuse were all the rage in crime fiction for a long time: you can chuck that now, writers. There's no shocking or even remotely novel/interesting angle to it.

It's not that I mind what other people engage with... but I don't know why people get engrossed in chronic ('true') stories of child abuse. I can hardly think of anything more upsetting.

@Stonehopper you have said it a lot better than I could have. It never occurred to me that people would go to auschwitz in a prurient and voyeuristic manner, but maybe some do. The fact is that it is set up to elicit reflection and the resolution to prevent such horrors from being committed again . There is control on the way the victims and their lives are represented which often isn’t the case with serial killer victims.

@EBearhug, I do agree with you in a sense I find it discordant when I've seen people (on here, for instance) recommend Dachau concentration camp as an 'easy day trip' for someone doing the tourist attractions of Munich, when you're done with the Frauenkirche and the Nymphenburg Palace. I went to Dachau when I was in my teens interrailing, because the friend I was travelling with badly wanted to go, and I think I remember more what struck me as the oddity of tourist queues and infrastructure etc on an atrocity site but then again, do you not have anywhere visitors can eat? Should you have a book shop so that people can educate themselves, and if so, what about stocking postcards etc?

I agree also about there being no way to test for purity of intention. It is of course possible that neo-Nazis get their kicks from visiting former camps, but it's also fairly clear from my memories of Dachau that people have gone to enormous lengths not to sensationalise the sites, and that they think that it's worth witless kids posting duckfaced selfies in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign and the like in order to educate.

I mean, it wasn't the London Dungeon.

Not suggesting the Arbeit Macht Frei sign is at Dachau -- was just thinking of obvious photo ops at concentration camp sites.

I can’t comment as I love anything crime related, always have even as a child. I have always thought it odd the common interest in crime though. I’ve always justified it by it being more of an interest in catching the perpetrators, the police side and in a way it is a way of addressing a fear of these things by focussing on killers being caught etc.

I think it’s similar to the way you read about disasters and tragedies in newspapers reading all the details, I think this is a way of protecting ourselves from the fear of these things. When you read all the details as well as feeling sadness/ shock etc at the event there’s another part of you that is looking at the reasons and circumstances of it so you can be sure it won’t happen to you. A way of distancing yourself from it.

It’s more worrying when the lines become blurred. Watching something like Dexter for example where suddenly you are not rooting for the police and celebrating justice being done. You find yourself on the side of the killer and I found that change in psychology very interesting.

I think @Angel2702 is right, I personally don't understand why this genre is so popular but perhaps subconsciously it's a way for people to play out their fears of the unknown, of meeting a horrible end themselves. The stories present horrible things but there are also the 'good guys' trying to save people and the bad guy usually gets caught.

It's a bit similar with medical mysteries, but I don't mind those as much. There's no glorifying the disease or enjoying people's pain.

Why do you find crime so interesting, @Angel2702? It does sometimes baffle me how central it is to entertainment -- tv schedules, podcasts, films, computer games, fiction and non-fiction. I imagine aliens observing earth and thinking 'This must be something earthlings worship, they spend so much time watching it and reading about it!'

And I absolutely find myself limited in TV and film in particular by not wanting to watch crime-related things in general, and specifically having no tolerance for violence, especially against women, and especially when rape is used as a plot device to either demonstrate how bad someone is, or as the beginning of a revenge plot. Together, that wipes out huge swathes of mainstream film and TV.

I watched the first episode of The Fall, for instance, which was well-made and with some excellent performances -- but why on earth would it be assumed I wanted to watch in close-up the face of a bound and gagged woman who knows she is about to be murdered, or possibly raped and then murdered? Whose idea of entertainment is that?

As someone who used to work at a Holocaust museum, I find the comparison to tacky tourist murder tours really offensive actually.

These memorials do not exist to entertain or titillate people, or glorify the perpetrators.

I'm not interested in i descriptions of violence and abuse.

I am interested in causes and consequences, the problem solving, moral ambiguity, issues of justice and mercy, and original characters - and writing that has depth and keeps my attention. Some of those books involve situations where there has been violence and abuse - but the books I enjoy do not place their focus there.

There is quite a range within the genre.

@dreamingbohemian

As someone who used to work at a Holocaust museum, I find the comparison to tacky tourist murder tours really offensive actually.

These memorials do not exist to entertain or titillate people, or glorify the perpetrators.

How did you find working there, @dreamingbohemian? Were you in a public-facing role?

@SemperIdem

I really enjoyed crime thrillers and what not when I was a teenager. As an adult I find them utterly dull, repetitive, unimaginative and borderline insulting.

As for the people who feverishly watch murder documentaries on Netflix etc - they’re the modern equivalent of the people who turned up to watch public executions and torture in the past.

There is far too much weight placed on talking about the criminal rather than the victims. The appallingly lauded Jack the Ripper being surely one of the oldest examples. The things done to the victim are vomit inducing, utterly horrifying. There shouldn’t be a jolly tour around Whitechapel about those murders.

That’s rubbish about Netflix documentaries. I watch them because I find it interesting to try and see what makes people do theses things as it’s so abnormal to me. I would have absolutely no desire to see an execution or anything like it. There is nothing wrong with this and in fact if nobody had any interest then there would be no forensic psychiatrists or psychologists to help prevent these things happening in the future. I completely get why you don’t like them but I find it unfair to slag off people who do. Also the past few I have recently watched have focused very much on the victims and less so on the perpetrators.

I like what they call "cozy" mysteries or "whodunnits" Where the story focuses on the puzzle of solving the crime.
As I'm Irish these are predominantly set in locations unfamiliar to me, so it adds another layer of unreality.
I don't like anything with the words "True Crime" in them, used to be a social worker and the devastation that even one violent act can wreak on a large number of people is too real for me.
I like my entertainment to be removed from my reality and if possible uplifting.
The older I've gotten the less I can stomach visual depictions of violence also, I watched the LOTR and thought they had brought the story to life so well.
I watched a bit of GOT and thought it was disgusting, all that violence and gore to no purpose.

@dreamingbohemian that does not mean that no one goes for 'kicks' whether you like it or not. I've seen concentration camps described as 'ghoulish.'

There is nothing wrong with this and in fact if nobody had any interest then there would be no forensic psychiatrists or psychologists to help prevent these things happening in the future.

I don't think this is true at all. I have friends in those fields, also a forensic archeologist who has done a lot of work with the police on finding murder victims, and a forensics policeman, and none has the remotest interest in 'true crime' stuff in any medium. If they have any response to TV or film stuff that's very much in the public domain, it's mostly irritation at things being wrongly or misleadingly depicted.

I read murder mysteries, but not because I enjoy reading about women being hurt or killed by men. I read them because I enjoy the mystery of who done it and why. I enjoy getting an insight into the minds of men that commit crimes, because it helps me to understand a bit. It makes me realise that some men are just sick in the head, and that helps me to cope with real life trauma. In a way it makes me realise that things that happen in real life aren’t because it was my fault or the woman who wore a short skirts fault, it’s because it highlights that the people who commit those crimes are seriously disturbed and it could have happened to any woman present. It wasn’t specifically me or them, if that makes sense?

But I’d not at all say anyone was weird or wrong for not enjoying them, I can’t watch them programs or movies with those themes because the visual reality of it is too distressing. The mental picture I see in my head while reading a book is nowhere near as graphic as those on tv etc

I don't think you're abnormal.

I've found of late I just cannot bear watching significant violence in films and TV programmes. DH and I were going to watch 1983 on Netflix: put it on the other day and the first 15 seconds were enough for me to be scrabbling for the remote to turn it off. I was watching Ackley Bridge with my middle son and there was an episode someone was badly beaten up, I could not watch the scenes it happened in. Not sure why- I've never been a fan but didn't used to have this intense reaction to it. Now it makes me feel sick and cold.

I am sometimes interested in mysteries and unsolved crimes but the details of the suffering of the victims... no, I don't want to read and see those. I stupidly followed a link to read about a horrific, disturbing, nightmare case from Japan some years ago where a girl was abducted, horribly tortured and eventually killed by male peers and I would pay good money to remove that knowledge from my head. Just thinking about it now is hideous.

@Stonehopper It was really an incredible experience, of course it was a very somber kind of job but it's so important to educate people on the Holocaust, and the museum had a very obvious impact on visitors.

I did work with the public, mostly on bringing groups of survivors and veterans to the museum. It was very difficult and emotional for them in particular.

So no, it was in no way comparable to a tacky Ripper tour. Obviously @borntohula is right that some people go to Holocaust sites for kicks, but that does not put them in the same league. The whole purpose and focus is different.

Oh and to answer an earlier point, we did actually have a cafe and it was deeply weird but a practical necessity.

I kind of agree, in that I can't read or watch anything explicit or violent relating to murder, or any violent crime. I just find it too disturbing.

I enjoy mild whodunnits like Agatha Christie because to me that's more about puzzle-solving. But anything where the focus is on the violence, where we see mutilated bodies and grieving relatives, I just find too disturbing. I don't have a clue why that's entertaining. I've heard people say they find the psychology interesting, but don't see why you need graphic depictions for that, or why graphic violence is so acceptable.

I've found a few documentaries/non-fiction interesting when they look at the social history or political aspects e.g. the recent BBC4 (I think) series on Peter Sutcliffe that focused a lot on the impact of police and media misogyny and attitudes to prostitution, also the brilliant book The Five which showed the Jack the Ripper victims as real human beings with families and friends - something I think is very much forgotten in the Ripper mythology.

A friend of mine lives in Whitechapel and there are frequent guided walking tours of the Jack the Ripper murder sites. I find that really ghoulish and disturbing that the Ripper has become almost a 'fun' part of East End history, with merchandise and a museum.

[quote dreamingbohemian]@Stonehopper It was really an incredible experience, of course it was a very somber kind of job but it's so important to educate people on the Holocaust, and the museum had a very obvious impact on visitors.

I did work with the public, mostly on bringing groups of survivors and veterans to the museum. It was very difficult and emotional for them in particular.

So no, it was in no way comparable to a tacky Ripper tour. Obviously @borntohula is right that some people go to Holocaust sites for kicks, but that does not put them in the same league. The whole purpose and focus is different.

Oh and to answer an earlier point, we did actually have a cafe and it was deeply weird but a practical necessity.[/quote]
Thanks, @dreamingbohemian. I can imagine the difficult compromises involved in catering to the needs of survivors or descendants while also managing tourist expectations.

This thread made me check whether the Dachau concentration camp museum is on Tripadvisor (not just idle curiosity, as I am currently writing about tourist expectations of another historically-significant place) -- and it is, and there are, incredibly, people saying it's boring compared to Auschwitz ('no sinister feelings here!' 'average, compared to Auschwitz), that they 'didn't feel punched in the gut', 'not much to see here', complaints about the original buildings having been torn down because it would have been a more 'authentic' experience, and complaints about the existence of a cafeteria outside the gates, and the quality of the audio guide. Some of the complaints suggest people were expecting the London Dungeon in Nazi uniforms.