ABSTRACT
Paul Britton’s (1997) The Jigsaw Man is an autobiographical book detailing the author’s career as a forensic psychologist working on various real-life criminal cases across the UK. Such a profi ler’s work entails answering questions regarding what it is that would make a person abduct, abuse, or kill others, and what it is that has happened in their life to trigger or mould them along the lines of the criminality in question. As
Britton (1997: 649) himself puts it, much like forensic science did a few years back, forensic psychology and offender profi ling nowadays captures the headlines and the imagination of the public, inspiring crime novels, TV dramas and feature fi lms. Psychological profi ling has hence come to be quite a contemporary trend in criminal investigations, and most particularly those involving serial killers. Besides, in investigating the state and nature of the serial killer’s victims, not to mention the setting of the crime(s) in question, the psychological profi ler needs to create the offender report not only so as to help the police trace and capture the killers in question, but also to do so fast, before they kill again. The language used in psychological profi ling is interesting in itself, as it allows access to various criminal mind styles, and is not unlike that language used in the texts analysed above. Britton’s psychological profi ling, for instance, employs the metaphors killers are players (“All the meticulous detail and elaborate camoufl age pointed to a man set on challenging the police, inviting them to play a game with him”, on p. 173, and “He’s primarily a games player”, on p. 178), and the related victims are playthings one (“They didn’t just kill for the sake of taking a life; their victims were playthings who were tortured and abused”, on p. 437). Similarly, the victims are trophies metaphor (“I think he might have put something on the sofa-a part of her [ . . . ] [T]he trophy-taking has confi rmed my worst fears about the killer”, on p. 390) is somewhat linked to the killer is artist and art collector simile, which Britton uses to explain to the reader how the criminal mind works exactly:
Imagine a person whose great mission in life is collecting paintings. There are two levels of need-one is the urge to locate and acquire the art, and then, afterwards at leisure there is the tremendous contentment at being able to look at it and say, ‘It’s mine.’ This [killer] was creating his own ‘work of art’ in a place that offered quiet pleasure and deep fulfi lment.
