Beyond Belief: A Chronicle of Murder and its Detection (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1967) (1968 paperback: ) 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. Literary genre and style 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 state of mind 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.) The book's chapters begin with epigraphs from other sources that are not always relevant to the murders, chosen by Williams in an attempt to evoke the mood in working-class Britain at that time. An example: for one chapter dealing with the murder spree itself, Williams quotes the Dave Clark Five song "Catch Us If You Can"—as if these words described the murderers' attitude at the time. Criticism As a work of literature, critics have not held Beyond Belief in the same high esteem as other crime-related nonfiction novels like In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1980). Indeed, the book seems to have fallen out of favor because many of Emlyn Williams' suggestions and theories about the Moors murders have since been disproven in subsequent years. Williams' florid prose style, questionable characterizations, and frequent discretionary editorializations on the events (both proven and alleged) have come to be regarded as overly speculative and sensationalistic, as well as rather quaintly stereotypical and dated. That the author had minimal contact with most of the individuals involved in