Unclean Hands

by Talia Lavin

The idea of murder creeping up in a healer’s white coat is a uniquely disturbing and awful thing; and nowadays, when millions of us die in hospitals and nursing facilities under harsh institutional lights, it’s a squirm-provokingly common story. In the U.S. there are so many ways of committing medical murder: by denied insurance claim, by prior authorization—there are countless forms of deadly violence that don’t involve a needle or a pillow, an empty vial or a stained hand. 

This year Angela Morris published Angels of Death: When the Hands that Heal Choose to Kill, a book about convicted German serial killer nurse Niels Högel. Though she doesn’t address it directly, Morris is also telling a grim little story of broader medical malfeasance—the poisoner was shuffled from ward to ward, hospital to hospital, like the diocese two-step of a malefactor priest. Reading this book, as with so many others this year, I thought, This should be written in red ink, red ink that smudges, so that all of us who peep at death for amusement from our warm safe beds should find our hands stained red by the end. 

My nominal excuse is that I am writing a novel, or for the present researching one, about a murderer; and thus I must learn as much as possible about her confraternity. Still, the appetite for grimness I’ve acquired over these months—the number of books about death, and the number of deaths in them—would drive an old penny-dreadful printer, or a Tyburn gallows-peeper, into a pallor. Of the 115 or so books I’ve read so far this year, an appalling proportion feature one person snuffing out another person’s life, or several, or as many as possible before they get caught. A good many of them were fictional, but more have been true, for a given value of true. Some murder books aren’t worth the paper, or pixels, they’re printed on. And some—the good ones, the rare ones—are better than anything you’ve read or will read.