An appreciation of the author Colin Wilson (1931-2013) - philosopher, critic, novelist

‘I believe that it is entirely possible, in the next decade or two, that the 21st century serial killer will go the way of the 18th-century highwayman – driven to functional extinction by the forces of civilisation, and by social and scientific development,’ writes Colin Wilson in An End to Murder (Robinson, UK £10.99, October 2015).

    But not only the days of serial killers are numbered, but of violence generally, maintains Colin’s son Damon who completed the book his father began two years before his death in 2013, aged 82. ‘The very reason that this book was written is because attitudes to violence in society have changed fundamentally over just a few hundred years,’ says Damon.

    The dispiriting story of the human race over the last few thousand years is one of unremitting violence: devastating wars, genocide, feuds, terrorism and cold-blooded murder. Our predilection for violence must be the single greatest threat to the continuance of our species. And looking at the state of the world today, especially with regard to the rise in global terrorism, it’s hard to believe there has been, or could be, any change for the better.

    Yet it is the theme of An End to Murder that, with the progress in forensic science and understandings brought by psychology, together with improved education and communications worldwide, it might be that mankind’s homicidal tendencies will soon be curbed.

    An End to Murder is a well-reasoned and admirably researched work on the part of Damon Wilson. The book is in three parts: in Part 1, Damon gives a historical perspective of violence, from the first hominids to today – could the strange evolution of the human body have inclined our species towards being habitually violent? – and explores the latest psychological, forensic and social attempts to understand and rein in human atrocity.

    Part 2 is Colin’s work (perhaps a quarter of the book), containing much that will be familiar to his longstanding readers, especially those who know his monumental in-depth study of criminology A Criminal History of Mankind (1984, 2nd edition 2005) or, for example, Serial Killers (2008), written with Damon, and Encyclopedia of Murder (1961) or its sequel, Encyclopedia of Modern Murder (1983), with Donald Seaman, from which titles Colin quotes. Part 3 comprises Damon’s conclusions.

    At the outset, Damon admits he has attempted to write a ‘sister book’ to A Criminal History of Mankind, and that he has included everything Colin wrote for the original manuscript of An End to Murder – his last original writing. But Damon could not continue what his father had written because he had been writing in the form of autobiography, focusing on his fascination with crime and his philosophical desire to understand criminality. So Damon had to write a new book around it.

    So was it Damon or Colin who came up with the title for the book, or did they think on it together? The title seems very optimistic but in tune with Colin’s philosophy of optimism, the ‘new existentialism’. Once arrived at, did Damon ever consider putting a question mark after the title?

    He told me: ‘I came up with the title, advised by my excellent editor at Robinson, Duncan Proudfoot. I thought I'd made it up off the top of my head, only later to find that it was the title of a Pathe News documentary, made in 1945, about the discovery of the Holocaust. It's possible, given the mountain of research I've done for the book over the years, that I might have actually seen it on the web, and later forgot it on all but a subconscious level.

    ‘The title that dad was working under, before his stroke, was The Mammoth Book of Homicidal Monsters­, so you can probably see why I was so keen to change it. It was a bit of a pot-boiler book for him, when he first took it on, but dad never wrote anything flippantly. He was again trying to look at “the problem of the criminal mind”, but this time through the lens of his own autobiography as a self-trained criminologist. If he had succeeded in writing such an insightful book, I like to think that he would have persuaded the publisher to allow a better title, even if that took it out of their much-loved “Mammoth” range.

    ‘I never considered putting a question mark after the title, simply because I believe that, circumstances of civilisation continuing as they have, that murder will indeed all but cease in the near future. I know that sounds ridiculously optimistic, but history is on my side here. Dickens believed that poverty should be eradicated, and was effectively ignored in his lifetime, but a century and a half later Dickensian poverty is gone from Britain's inner cities. This was not a matter of charity or a Scrooge-like conversion of the rich to humanitarianism, but of science and economics. As I say in the book, life is much more selfishly profitable for everyone when we add an “e” to the end of the word “human”.’

    The causes of a global fall in unnecessary violence over the last 20 years – the main reason for writing the book – are many but strong, says Damon: ‘The recent fall in violent crime, and the absence of global conflict for over two-thirds of a century, may indicate that our educated intelligence may at last be edging us ahead of our catastrophically brutal inclinations.’

    Damon shows there has been a decline in violent crime at least since the 1980s, and gives some reasons as to why he thinks this has happened. He suggests that among the factors which have led to the decrease in violent crime since the 1980s are, perhaps surprisingly, the removal of leaded petrol – lead pollution in the atmosphere is known to cause brain damage – legalised abortion, thus reducing the number of unwanted and so possibly dysfunctional children, and even the spread of computer games keeping hooligans off the streets. But does he think statistics from a period of 30-40 years are sufficient to suggest a continuing decline in criminality?

    ‘Developing police forensic techniques, general education and the various environmental factors I describe in the book, are pushing the violent death figures steadily downward,’ said Damon. ‘There will always be murders – by people who lose control of their tempers, or governments who “have to make tough decisions” – but the sheer scale of homicide has fallen dramatically and steadily, across the planet, since the Middle Ages.