Books by Murderers

March 31, 2011 9:13 AM

Given that a book collection can be quite valuable if it has a quirky theme, keep in mind that Books by Murderers is on its 5th installment (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) over at the blog of respected London second hand bookshop Any Amount of Books.

The posts are supposed to be a series of book collecting tips but end up being an oddball collection of anecdotes about writers gone homicidal and assassins who got into writing.

"[this new potential area for book collection is] Quite restricted, especially if you stick to those who wrote books before they became killers. A friend who collects books by deaf writers has amassed an enormous collection. The problem is that if a writer lives long enough there is a good chance he will become deaf. Deaf murderers might restrict a collection too much however."

Other potential collections:
Writers who were invalids

Homeless writers 1 and 2

posted by lucia__is__dada (7 comments total)

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Oh, MetaFilter, what website won't you crush under your mighty bulk?
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:24 AM on March 31, 2011

Didn't see a mention of Anne Perry.
posted by empath at 9:26 AM on March 31, 2011

ha! empath beat me to it. I was just about to point that out.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:27 AM on March 31, 2011

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
posted by chavenet at 9:35 AM on March 31, 2011 [1 favorite]

Richard Klinkhamer
posted by joost de vries at 9:37 AM on March 31, 2011

Famous travel writer and intellectual Krystian Bala boasted anonymously in an e mail to the Polish ‘ Crimewatch ‘ that he had committed ‘ the perfect crime ‘ when he had brutally murdered Dariusz Janiszewski in 2000. The police, however, could do nothing until a detective received an anonymous call five years later urging him to read the crime novel Amok, which had appeared three years after the murder. The detective found a copy and discovered that the details of the murder exactly matched those in the novel. -- TFA


Textbook, stuff again, you see. The criminals' vanity always makes them make one tiny, but fatal, mistake. Theirs was to have their entire conspiracy printed and published in plain manuscript. (to Guards) Take them away! -- Blackadder, Series Three, Episode Four

Oh, and while I have your attention... Macbeth!
posted by Naberius at 10:18 AM on March 31, 2011

Great post. I loved this aside in part 4:

"I recall buying a box of jacketed novels and looking without success for some sort of persistent theme. A customer who saw me pricing them noticed that every single jacket had a woman on it wearing earrings. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"
posted by BigSky at 2:09 PM on March 31, 2011