Real events often inspire writers, but incorporating real-life trauma into entertainment requires very delicate handling
Steve Mosby
How far should novelists intrude on actual events? … police tape. Photograph: Alamy
On the afternoon of 12 July 2007, Sergei Yatzenko set off on a motorcycle from his home in Taromskoye, a small village in south-central Ukraine. His mutilated body was discovered by relatives four days later. Yatzenko was a victim of Viktor Soyenko and Igor Suprunyuck, who became known as the "Dnepropetrovsk maniacs": two 19-year-olds who tortured and murdered 21 people in the space of a month, striking at random and without apparent motive. The killers took numerous photographs and videos of their crimes, and in December 2008, footage of Sergei Yatzenko's murder leaked onto the internet.
I was researching a novel about shock sites and murderabilia at the time; I watched the video, then became fascinated with the case. One detail in particular haunts me. A longer version of that horrific video shows a grinning Suprunyuck waiting by the side of a quiet country lane with a hammer in a carrier bag. Sergei Yatzenko can be seen approaching in the distance, entirely unsuspecting. The truth is that he could have been any of us.
A few years later, I wrote Dark Room, which was partly inspired by the Dnepropetrovsk murders. The similarities ended up being relatively superficial, but I still felt uneasy. There is frequent discussion about exploitation and the rise of explicit violence in crime fiction. Can it ever be right to use true crime and real suffering as the basis for entertainment?
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I was researching a novel about shock sites and murderabilia at the time; I watched the video, then became fascinated with the case. One detail in particular haunts me. A longer version of that horrific video shows a grinning Suprunyuck waiting by the side of a quiet country lane with a hammer in a carrier bag. Sergei Yatzenko can be seen approaching in the distance, entirely unsuspecting. The truth is that he could have been any of us.
A few years later, I wrote Dark Room, which was partly inspired by the Dnepropetrovsk murders. The similarities ended up being relatively superficial, but I still felt uneasy. There is frequent discussion about exploitation and the rise of explicit violence in crime fiction. Can it ever be right to use true crime and real suffering as the basis for entertainment?
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