Murderland: a 'hauntingly compulsive' book

In the 1970s and 1980s, America's Pacific Northwest was home to a remarkable number of serial killers, said Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. The "charming, extremely intelligent" Ted Bundy grew up in the port city of Tacoma, Washington. Gary Ridgway (aka the Green River Killer) lived there too, and Charles Manson spent five years in jail in the city before "starting his Family" in California. Meanwhile, Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, lived not far away in Oregon.

In her "hauntingly compulsive" book, journalist Caroline Fraser (herself a native of Tacoma) argues that this cluster was more than pure accident. Just outside Tacoma was the notorious Asarco smelting facility, which for decades pumped out lead and other chemicals, contaminating air and water. (It was responsible for the infamous "Aroma of Tacoma".) Exposure to these toxins, Fraser suggests, increased the population's propensity for violence. Washington's murder rate in the mid-1970s was "almost six times the national average"; Tacoma's was higher still. Mixing memoir, biography and history, "Murderland" is a book that "gets into your blood".

The "lead-crime hypothesis" isn't new, said Francesca Angelini in The Sunday Times. "Epidemiologists have found an almost perfect correlation between the rise and fall of lead in the environment and the rise and fall in crime." Where Fraser breaks new ground is in applying this theory to some of America's most notorious serial killers. Her book, while reading like "a true crime thriller", doubles as a polemic about the rapacious greed of heavy industry: for decades, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, leaded-gasoline lobbyists insisted it "presented no problems". Other things can help explain the murder spike of the 1970s – including the popularity of hitchhiking – but Fraser "does build a compelling theory" about pollution.

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"Murderland" is in some ways a "maddening" book, said Timothy Egan in The New York Times. "Fraser jumps around in time and topic", alighting one moment on "Rommel's desert campaign in WWII", at another on the "bubble-gum pop songs she grew up with". And despite the plethora of data, her thesis leaves many unanswered questions. "What about the many thousands of people who also lived under Asarco's toxic plume and went on to have normal lives?" Fraser mostly gets away with it "because she's such a gifted writer". "Murderland" works best as a "literary" narrative – a story about "crimes of industry choking the life out of the natural world, spawning crimes of the heart".

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