Channeling Your Inner Psychopath

It has been many years since I read a self-help book (I'm pretty much beyond help at this point), but The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success caught my eye and fancy. Catchy title, and it deals with a kind of cop-out increasingly common in mysteries and thrillers, and possibly in the real world as well. Who, what, where, when, and why are the five Ws of mystery fiction, and readers love digging them out alongside the detective. But as soon as the word "psychopath" is applied to the culprit, motive becomes moot.

Psychopaths in fiction are understood to be serial killers for motives barely discernible or sufficient to the rest of us. Once one appears, the balance of the story, while it will likely contain some hair-raising passages, is actually pretty lame and pointless for the avid armchair investigator. It morphs into a race-to-catch-him-before-he-kills-again thriller. So who are these mysterious story spoilers, these cold fish, these mass murderers, and what drives them to do what they do?

Professor Kevin Dutton is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy. He has spent his career at the University of Oxford studying psychopaths, and is the author of a previous popular science book on the subject, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success.

Andy McNab is a former SAS officer and the successful author of several war thrillers, two of which are purported autobiographies of action during the Iraq War. He is also the highest scorer ever in Dr. Dutton's ongoing psychopathic research project.

The purpose of The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success, co-authored by this unlikely pair, is to expose the more useful qualities of the psychopath and to teach the diligent reader how to get in touch with them in himself, to improve his own life.

Many of the qualities Dutton attributes to psychopaths are positive or neutral. Charisma, fearlessness and mental toughness, ability to monofocus, and impulsivity are all normal and generally harmless traits. But add in a total lack of both empathy and the capacity for remorse, and you may be looking at a psychopath. Not that psychopaths don't understand empathy on an intellectual level; they don't––literally can't, if Dutton is correct––feel it, although most of them are superb manipulators of the emotions of others. This seems confusing, in light of his apparently conflicting theory that psychopathic characteristics can be selected and reinforced in the average person. Like many self-help books, this one has interactive quizzes at the end of many chapters, so you can evaluate your own psychopathic tendencies. Or you can take this test online.

So what did I learn from this book? I learned that brain patterns in psychopaths are different from the norm. Parts of the amygdala, the "crocodile brain" that controls emotion, are missing or malfunctioning in psychopaths. Many of the qualities that define psychopathy are present in all of us, in varying degrees at various times, but the psychopath is literally unable to make certain mental and emotional leaps and connections that define civilized society.

In war and sports, psychophaths can be assets; their lightning-fast decisiveness, fearlessness, and unrelenting drive toward a goal, regardless of the price paid––by others––can achieve objectives the more scrupulous might not. Their criminality, or lack of it, seems to be situational, rather than proceeding from anything recognizable as conscience or empathy. The cleverest of them may become CEOs of major corporations, sports stars, or politicians. However, according to this article in LiveScience, while psychopaths make up only one percent of the general population, they comprise 25 percent of all men in federal prisons. Yikes!

The Good Psychopath's Guide had rather a lot of chummy "me and my mate Andy" passages that made me wonder a bit about the relationship between researcher and subject. And an annoyingly EXCESSIVE number of words were CAPITALIZED, presumably for emphasis. The sections Andy wrote display a level of narcissism and sheer bloody-mindedness that we might expect from a psychopath. What I hadn't expected was his pervasive sense of humor, even when discussing the torture he underwent as a POW in Iraq.

But did any of this help me to better understand and appreciate the psychopath of detective fiction? Or how to channel my own inner psychopath to improve my life? Not really; the emotional disconnect required seems to be inborn or learned very young. The message seems to be: don't waffle, go straight for what you want, ignoring any faces you happen to step on in the process, unless they can be useful to you. Don't take anything personally, even defeat, but look for advantage in every event. (Nice if you can manage it.)

The book was full of wickedly humorous anecdotes, and several jokes that seemed to be stuck in anywhere, rather than to illustrate a particular point. It offers a lively and interesting, if somewhat troubling, look at a condition most of us, I hope, will never really understand. Hannibal Lecter and The Joker are no more comprehensible to me than they were before.

Castillo and Unger and Giveaways, Oh My!

For many Americans, the image of our hardy pioneer forebears struggling to make the wilderness productive and living their simple, but rewarding, lives is deeply embedded in our national psyche. In most respects, the Amish still embody those sturdy values of faith, honesty, hard work, and care for their neighbors. Author Linda Castillo's series featuring Chief of Police Kate Burkholder opens this hidden world to readers in a sensitive and often sympathetic manner.

The Dead Will Tell: A Kate Burkholder Novel by Linda Castillo (Book 6) (Minotaur, July 8, 2014)

Dale Michaels had been receiving threatening letters, culminating in a request for a meeting at the old burned-out Hochstetler farm. "I know what you did," proclaimed the first. Dale's body is found by his daughter in his own barn. He'd been shot and hanged. Stuffed deep into his mouth is one of the faceless Amish peg dolls with "Hochstetler" carved in the bottom. Several similar murders follow. The only known surviving Hochstetler is Billy, who was 14 the night his father was shot, his mother kidnapped, and his four siblings burned to death in the fire that subsequently swept through the farmhouse. Billy had hidden the younger children in a cellar while he ran to get the help that arrived too late. Today, Billy, who was later adopted by the Yoders, runs an apple orchard with the help of his wife and children. The case was never solved, and despite monumental efforts by the police, the body of Billy's mother, Wanetta, was never found. While Billy is the obvious suspect, his Amish wife swears that he was at home the night Dale was killed.

Amish Peg Dolls

Kate Burkholder was raised Amish, and while she is shunned for having defected to "the English" (the Amish name for anyone outside of their community), her ability to speak to members in their modified high German language is an asset in her police work. When she is approached by a terrified town council member who has also been receiving threatening notes, she realizes that she may first have to solve that old Hochstetler case to find the perpetrator of the current series of brutal murders. Several people have reported seeing an Amish woman walking along the roads at night. Some think it is the ghost of Wanetta, seeking her revenge. But Wanetta, if still alive, would be a very old woman now. The solution offers a rather unusual twist on the adage that old sins cast long shadows.

In the Blood by Lisa Unger (Touchstone, January 7, 2014; paperback edition by Pocket Books, July 22, 2014) (Non-series)

Lana Granger, the first-person narrator of Lisa Unger's stand-alone psychological thriller, is a liar. But then, so are most of the other major characters in this creepy, well-written thriller. At age 11, Lana came home one day to find her father standing over her murdered mother. He forced Lana to help him bury the body and lie to the police. Despite his efforts, he was tried for murder, and is currently on death row, all appeals having finally failed.

Lana is in graduate school studying psychology, with her trust fund running low. At the suggestion of her mentor, she accepts a job as part-time nanny to 11-year-old Luke, a troubled child. From the beginning Luke, a near genius, is manipulative and controlling. Lana, who was a brilliant and difficult child herself, feels a certain sympathy with both the boy and his harried mother, Rachel, so she falls in with his obscure and somewhat creepy games. The boy's father is not in evidence and is never mentioned.

The story is interspersed with the diary entries of an unnamed woman struggling to cope with her brilliant but defective "high maintenance" child. Then, Lana's roommate, Rebecca, disappears, the second of Lana's friends to do so within a few months. A brooding sense of twisted lives infuses this book almost from the beginning. It kept me second guessing myself throughout, with a surprise that pulled it all together at the end. Are psychopaths born or made? Can they ever be a functioning part of society, or are they just too dangerous? Read this book and decide for yourself. This was the first thriller I've read by Lisa Unger, but it certainly won't be the last!

Both Kate and Lana have borne witness to––and unwillingly participated in––terrible crimes in their earlier lives that led to their completely reinventing themselves as people. The insanity in Castillo's book, imposed by horrific outside events, feels almost clean in comparison to the (perhaps?) genetic evil that infuses Unger's. Both are terrific summer reads.

The Giveaway:

Through the courtesy of Minotaur Books/St. Martin's Press and Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, we have a package consisting of a hardcover copy of Linda Castillo's The Dead Will Tell and a mass-market paperback copy of Lisa Unger's In the Blood to send to one lucky reader in the U.S. or Canada. If interested, email us at materialwitnesses@gmail.com by next Friday, July 11. One reader will be randomly selected to have the chance to read and compare these two chilling and remarkable books. We'd love to hear what you think of them!

Happy Independence Day. Long may it wave!