It was just over 20 years ago that John Lennon was killed, one in a long line of assassinations that shaped both the 20th century and the contemporary psyche (while the old maxim of remembering where one was when Kennedy was killed predates me, I vividly recall hearing of Lennon’s murder).

Strangely enough, as George (formerly Douglas) Fetherling points out in his introduction to A Biographical Dictionary of the World’s Assassins, we remember the victims of assassinations, but rarely recall the assassins themselves. Who, for example, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, helping ignite the First World War and altering world history? Fetherling’s book is an attempt to redress this situation, to shed light on the assassins themselves.

As a reference, the Biographical Dictionary is a success; macabre and fascinating, well-researched and concise. It is one of those rare reference books that can be read with considerable pleasure from cover to cover, or used for dedicated research (the index of victims will help readers find the appropriate assassin). Fetherling is to be congratulated for this work of fascinating scholarship.

As accomplished as Fetherling’s scholarship is, however, I found something vaguely disturbing about the nature of the Biographical Dictionary. Despite its generally sensitive and sympathetic treatment of the victims throughout, Fetherling’s focus on assassins has given these murderers what so many of them seem to crave – public recognition and a forum for the beliefs and rationales that drove them to kill. It could be argued that the reason assassins are largely forgotten is that they are small men whose sole attempts at greatness have robbed the world of great men and women. By giving them this attention, Fetherling could be seen as implicitly rewarding their actions.