The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

The Insomnia blog has a fabulously macabre cover by one of our favourite artists/designers, Rian Hughes, posted up; its to grace a new tale (by Martin Conaghan and Will Pickering) of Burke and Hare. For those of you not familiar with this gruesome tale Burke and Hare are two of the most infamous ‘resurrection men’ in criminal history, although unlike other bodysnatchers they decided breaking into night-time graveyards to dig up recent corpses to sell to the anatomists was far too much like hard work and instead turned to murdering people then selling the bodies to Doctor Knox at Edinburgh University’s famous medical school. Imagine the twisting, towering stone tenements of Edinburgh’s Old Town, the sea mist spiralling around the closes and wynds and even to this day it is quite easy walking those streets at night to imagine Burke and Hare materialising from the fog, dragging another victim’s body over the cobbled streets to the back door of the medical school. Small wonder the tale inspired so many other artists over the years (including Robert Louis Stevenson) to craft new fictions, poetry and films drawing on those events.

(cover to Burke & Hare by Martin Conaghan and Will Pickering, cover by Rian Hughes, published Insomnia)

Incidentally Burke is still a resident of Edinburgh, despite being hung in 1829; in a ghoulishly appropriate piece of sentencing he was not only condemned to swing from the gallows (right around the corner from where I am writing) but to be publicly dissected afterwards. His skeleton still dangles in the medical school’s fascinating anatomy museum in the city (he appears to have been a rather wee man judging by it); in another gruesome twist one of the medical staff overseeing the dissection was an amateur leather-worker and made ‘gifts’ for friends from Burke’s tanned skin, such as notebook covers, some of which can also still be seen (in a more modern twist on the selling of bodies the pair lend their name to a strip bar in the city!). The Burke & Hare book will also boast an introduction by Alan Grant and a bonus art gallery with contributions from Gary Erskine, Frank Quitely, Colin MacNeil and others; next week the Insomnia blog is promising a Q&A with the book’s writer Martin Conaghan, so its worth bookmarking.