Ill Met By Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
It is that moment when bonds of interest and affection, which commonly act as a restraint on the passions and the individual will, are severed; the murderer rejects the authority of society, and, in doing so, proclaims himself an alien. In society we live amicably by accepting limitations placed on our freedom to exercise our will. We commonly accept those limitations willingly, recognising, if only tacitly or unconsciously, that they are the obverse of society’s duty to protect our own Persons and Property. As Burke put it in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, `Man cannot enjoy the rights. of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it.’ It is this convention, on which civil society is properly based, that the murderer rejects, asserting instead his own right `to be his own Governor’.
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