The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

This 1824 prototype of the psycho-killer confessional novel is eerily brought to life in a new reading by Nicholas McArdle and Peter Kenny. The book has two parts: the first is a third-hand account of the story, read by the steady-voiced McArdle, the second is the memoirs of the possessed killer, read by the younger-voiced Kenny who embodies the main character and tells the story of his tutelage under a mysterious Satan-like entity. One would think a nearly two-hundred-year-old novel would be stylistically dated, but it sounds contemporary in both style and subject matter. The narrators’ well-paced reading and their clarity with the Scots accent make it all the more accessible to listeners today.

F.T., AudioFile

Given the choice of listening to a novel about the Calvinist doctrine of predestination or a chilling murder mystery about demonic possession, I suspect most people would go for the Jekyll-and-Hyde option. No need to choose: this gothic thriller, published anonymously in 1824, is a mixture of both and was, apparently, the inspiration for Stevenson’s story. Until it was rediscovered a century later by André Gide, who described it as a ‘voluptuously tormenting’ work, none of Hogg’s work was in print. It is the book’s format as much as the story that makes it memorable. It reads like an authentic historical document. Parts 1 and 3 are ostensibly written by the editor, who has come into possession of a notebook discovered among the mouldering bones of a suicide’s grave. Part 2 is the verbatim notebook, the eponymous confessions of one Robert Wringhim, a demented serial killer whose attempted justifications are described in the ‘voluptuously tormented prose’. He’s innocent, of course. He didn’t kill anyone, not even his older brother George, but if he did, it wasn’t his fault. He was put up to it by his charismatic mentor, Mr Gil-Martin. Either that or Mr G-M (who is better at disguises than Richard Hannay) did it pretending to be Wringhim. Not that it really matters who stabbed George or the other victims because, according to Calvinist doctrine (Wringhim is a fundamental Calvinist), most people including laddish George are preordained to go to hell. Wringhim and his mentor are among the chosen few predestined for heaven, no matter how many souls they dispatch. It’s all rather wild, but having heard the editor’s sober version in Part 1 you know the facts and can work it out for yourself. Sort of. The trouble is that both readers make their characters so convincing it’s hard to know who or what to believe. One thing only is beyond doubt. Wringhim is absolutely barking.

Sue Arnold, the Guardian