Dennis Nilsen - Conversations with Britain's Most Evil Serial Killer by Russ Coffey

could do was lean on them to tell the world how badly Dennis Nilsen was being treated. He felt he was doing a better job of that himself.
    There had been two incidents over the summer of 1983 when Nilsen got a story in the papers, and he considered both a success. In May, Nilsen wrote to the
Guardian
newspaper, complaining that he had been misrepresented when Alan Rusbridger’s column had claimed he’d been a member of the Social Democratic Party. Nilsen pointed out that he was a socialist rather than a liberal, and that he’d never joined anyparty in his life. In fact, when asked to tick a box on his union forms, it had always been ‘independent radical’.
    And then there was the ‘Chamberpot Incident’. At the end of the summer, Nilsen decided to show those around him that he would not stand for the inhuman conditions under which he was being kept. It had all started when Nilsen’s objections to the conditions of remand had resurfaced. He had threatened to protest against the way he, a man who had not yet stood trial, had to wear the clothes of a prisoner, by walking around naked. The response from the warders had been to tell Nilsen to remain in his cell. This, in turn, then had prevented him from being able to ‘slop out’. The faeces and urine built up in his pot to the point where the pot was overflowing with effluent. Determined to win the stand-off, on the evening of 1 August, Nilsen shouted ‘stand clear’ and threw the contents through the bars and out of the cell on to the landing. Several guards were hit and they retaliated robustly. In the ensuing scuffle, Nilsen lost a tooth, picked up a black eye, and earned himself 56 days in solitary confinement.

    During Nilsen’s nine months on remand, his only regular visitor was author Brian Masters. The resulting study,
Killing for Company,
would go on to win the 1985 Gold Dagger crime writing award. Such a close relationship between author and criminal reminded some critics of Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
, his celebrated study on the perpetrators of the Clutter family murders in Kansas. Masters’ observational dynamic was, indeed, so unusual, it later became the subject of a BBC documentary,
Monochrome Man.
    Brian Masters grew up in a prefabricated house onLondon’s Old Kent Road, where his sickly, hunchbacked mother and ineffectual father had been housed after the war. Prospects for children like him, he says in his autobiography
Getting Personal
were limited. However, he was determined to better himself. One episode at school changed the course of his life. Looking to win a prize for best school project, Masters wrote to the acerbic TV personality Gilbert Harding, asking to interview him. Harding agreed to the request and afterwards invited his young interviewer to tea. Later, he made it his business to educate the ambitious lad. Masters is very clear that his motives were entirely genuine.
    Harding’s mentoring helped Masters earn a place at Cardiff University, where he ended up with first-class honours in French Literature. He built on this by writing studies on Sartre and Camus. In his thirties, he moved on to biographies about British royalty. One on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was particularly well received.
    In his early forties, Masters was interested in understanding the extreme possibilities of human behaviour. He read about the Nilsen case over breakfast one morning in his west London home. As he got to the end of the third page of revelations about the murders, he read a line about Nilsen enjoying reading Shakespeare. He wondered if this might be the opportunity he was looking for to study someone at the farthest end of the human spectrum. Towards the end of March, and ignorant of the protocol about writing to prisoners, Masters wrote a letter addressed to Nilsen c/o Brixton Prison. In it, he asked if he might want to co-operate with a book project. He also included a copy one of his previous biographies.
    Although he knew he’d