Creep-Stakes Entry

BEYOND BELIEF by Emlyn Williams. 354 pages. Random House. $5.95.

This production is not a nonbook or even a sex book. It belongs to the growing category of ugh-books.

As the latest representative of the new thing--the de-Sade-but-true school of literature--it owes something to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, except that Capote is a far better writer than Emlyn Williams, the Welsh actor and dramatist (Night Must Fall, The Corn Is Green). Williams enters the lucrative literary creep-stakes, dragging behind him two human monsters and three well-mutilated corpses. He is writing about the "Moors murders," a gruesome three-act melodrama of cold-bloodletting that captivated British headline readers from Nov. 23, 1963, when the first murder occurred, until long after Oct. 7, 1965, when the plodding bobbies of Lancashire made their arrest.

No one could mistake the murderers, young Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, for Bonnie and Clyde; as rendered by Author Williams, they are closer to Jekyll and Hyde, complete with Victorian-melodrama makeup. Ian, 25, is the main figure, but wind him as he will, Williams cannot bring his manic mannequin to life.

The illegitimate son of a Glasgow tearoom waitress, Ian Brady had a gift for making even his tastes in the varieties of evil seem a cliche. As a boy, he buried a cat alive, collected Nazi souvenirs, stole shillings from gas meters around Manchester. After early crushes on such villains as Josef Kramer, commandant of the Belsen concentration camp, and Harry Lime of The Third Man, Ian finally met his true soul mate in the Marquis de Sade--a literary encounter that Williams recklessly compares to Keats's stumbling upon Chapman's Homer.

By this time, Ian, a nondescript clerk, had met Myra, 18, a typist who soon began moonlighting for Ian as a sadist's apprentice. When their parlor perversities and homemade dirty photographs began to pall, there was very little left to do but to test De Sade's theory: "Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure." A young corpse a year, with frequent visits to the graves on the moors, kept Ian and Myra reasonably serene but leaves Williams feverishly laying out plot and explication like a row of tombstones.* He points, he nudges, he oohs and ahs in both Scottish and Lancashire accents until prison doors finally clank for keeps on his terrible twosome.

In a genre that must be underplayed, Williams hokes up the script into near parody. He huffs and puffs doom like an overamplified Greek chorus, and lays on the suspense with all the foot-clumping subtlety of a horror movie.

In spite of its shortcomings, Beyond Belief is bound to attract attention and readers. And it does perform at least one service. For the murder buff and the amateur psychiatrist, it supplies the details of a spectacular crime, saving them the cumbersome job of digging into the court files or old newspaper clippings.

* John Kilbride, 12, died Nov. 23, 1963; Lesley Ann Downey, 10, died Dec. 26, 1964; Edward Evans, 17, died Oct. 6, 1965.

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