Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection

Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967) (1968 paperback: ISBN ) is a semi-fictionalized account of the Moors murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, by the Welsh author and playwright, Emlyn Williams. As such, it may be classified as a nonfiction novel.

First published in 1967, a year after the Moors murderers were sentenced to life imprisonment, the book is a mixture of reportage, speculation, literary allusions, and stream-of-consciousness writing—with phonetically rendered dialogue and eye dialect used to reflect the heavy regional accents and speech idioms of the working class milieu in Manchester and Glasgow. Williams also makes use of interior monologues to suggest possible explanations as to the killers' motives and leading up to their crimes.

The book has much in common with the genre of writing known as New Journalism since it narrates an actual murder case through the author's own creative interpretations and idiosyncratic literary style. In this sense, Beyond Belief can be considered a "nonfiction novel" in the manner of Meyer Levin's 1956 book Compulsion (about the Leopold and Loeb case) and Truman Capote's 1966 masterpiece In Cold Blood (about the Clutter murders). (Ironically, Compulsion was one of Ian Brady's favorite books, which he gave Myra Hindley to read shortly after they began their relationship in December 1961.)

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