I am a great admirer of William Bolitho's writing style, which, once understood, possesses a richness that has rarely been attempted (and never nowadays), and even more rarely achieved. Twelve Against the Gods and, more surprisingly, Camera Obscura, are forgotten gems, waiting for those rare few readers who would alight upon their riches and receive the same thrill that Howard Carter felt, when he breached an unpromising piece of stone and saw his candlelight flicker on Tutankhamun's gold. Murder for Profit, an earlier piece, is stylistically akin to those other two titles mentioned, but the refining process of its gold seems to have been less successful, and retains traces of the base metal.

Murder for Profit is a sort of dry run for Bolitho's later Twelve Against the Gods. In a series of essay-like chapters, the author holds court on a number of prominent 'mass-murderers' (what we would now call serial killers): their crimes, their psychological makeup and the societal context. It's interesting, of course (true crime always is), but Bolitho's regal style is less suited to the five shabby criminals of Murder for Profit than it is to the twelve historical figures of Twelve Against the Gods. It is not always clear what Bolitho is trying to achieve by his analysis, and, unlike his other books I have mentioned, any contemporariness in the book is bled out by his choice of topic. Of the five murderers, only Burke and Hare (taken as one) remain infamous today. It makes it hard to follow the stories of Troppmann, Smith, Landru and Haarmann when not only does the author have a wider scope in mind (Bolitho's not a straight storyteller, nor is he concerned with penny-dreadful curiosity), but knowledge of those crimes hasn't endured into our own times. Bolitho assumes a familiarity with their cases (some of which would have been remembered, on Murder for Profit's publication, as headlines just a few years old) that a modern reader just isn't going to have.

That said, there is more than enough of Bolitho's style and prestige in the book to make it a worthwhile read. But who would read it? True crime readers will be frustrated by the lack of focus on the crimes themselves; those who thirst for writing of literary calibre would be better served by Twelve and Camera Obscura. Bolitho is so obscure nowadays that it is unlikely that many – if any – would stumble across him by chance, like all those generations of Egyptians who walked across the desert sand not knowing a tomb of undiscovered gold lay beneath their feet. So who is left? Only myself, and I have read it – and preferred his other works. Bolitho deserves better, and so perhaps all I can do now is drag to the surface just one example of his unique brand of lyrical wealth, and show it to the world, before the tomb collapses back into its unjust obscurity. Referring to the prospect of cannibalism in the case of Fritz Haarmann, Bolitho elegantly ties its dread emergence into his wider themes of society's responsibility for crime and the general desolation after the Great War:

"In Germany at any rate, socially the most advanced State in our civilization, the war series, from band-music to man-eating, was thus actually completed. In four years' action of the State, guided by statesmen whom it would only be a paradox to call criminals, in the strict observance of the most banal political morality, the days of werwolves and anthropophagi were brought back in Europe." (pg. 180) ( )