Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking photographs’. One of the most successful of these is a black and white image of male and female figures: ‘Gruesome and gaunt, they look like extras from an early piece of zombie cinema.’ They are, it soon becomes clear, oddments saved by firemen from a blaze at Madame Tussauds in 1925. Madame Tussaud, the author reminds us, ‘would ‘tiptoe through the piles of corpses behind the guillotine to discover the most illustrious of the heads, and would promptly make casts of them, her hands bathed in their blood’.

Each little chapter of Known Unknowns begins with a photograph and a headline in capitals and small letters, such as ‘WIN a DATE with a RAPIST SERIAL KILLER’, which concerns Rodney Alcala, who appeared on the American show The Dating Game in 1978. A decade earlier he had been ‘spotted luring an eight-year-old girl into his apartment’. Later ‘the girl was found raped and beaten with a steel bar’. On The Dating Game, ‘Alacala won a date with beauty queen Cheryl Bradshaw, who subsequently said she found him “creepy” and refused to go out with him.’ Alcala is now in prison, and detectives have ‘estimated he could have murdered anywhere between 50 and 100 women’.

To give an idea of the ground covered in the 99 short chapters, here are eight of the headings (reduced to conventional ortho-graphy) and quotations from the accompanying text:

Ladies who like a ladykiller. ‘Why do psychopathic killers behind bars routinely get postbags full of love letters and marriage proposals?’

Down the drain: ‘Police officers knocked at Nilsen’s door and told him his drains were full of human remains.