Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers is not merely a book: it is a haunted object; it is a helter-skelter ride down into Dante’s inferno, an archaeological dig into an England previously unseen.

It contains within it the story of a notorious couple – a loving, long-term and rather dreary looking couple – who committed crimes so heinous, against family members and strangers alike, and for so long a period, that they now occupy their own dark corner in English criminal history. Like the rarest of pop stars, politicians or celebrities, they are recognised by their first names alone.

Fred and Rose.

I’d make the bold claim that Happy Like Murderers, Burn’s long and detailed account of Fred and Rose West and the murders, rapes and kidnappings they committed, is the best British crime book ever written. I’ve pressed copies into the hands of friends and then had them silently returned weeks later with a lowering of the eyes, a frown or a slow shaking of the head. Not because the book is bad, but because it is so unflinchingly honest – this is a book to be survived.

If the case of Jimmy Savile (a subject Burn would surely have tackled in his own inimitable way had he still been with us) has taught us anything, it’s that the keeping quiet about rape, torture, incest and murder allows them to carry on unchecked. Silence is complicity, and in the case of Savile, several major British institutions must shoulder some blame. “They were different times” is no excuse. Similarly, we learn that the Wests could have been halted, had the signs been better interpreted.

In Happy Like Murderers, Burn drags England’s grubby little secrets out from the cellar and into the sunlight for all to see. He lays them out on the lawn, on the patio, and picks them apart. He asks “how?” and wonders “why?” There is little judgment on display here, a factor that elevates this book high above sensationalism and into a rare literary sphere inhabited by those few books that Burn cited as an influence, chief among them In Cold Blood by Truman Capote and The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, two touchstone works that pioneered the genre of factual fiction and the embedded journalist-as-author. Happy Like Murderers easily holds its own in this slim pantheon.

Not only is this reportage at the most involved and forensic level, it is also novelistic, with Burn giving voice to all concerned, not least the victims who, in such cases, often get overshadowed by the bogeyman figures whose orbits they have had the great misfortune to wander into.

First published in 1998, few who have read the book in the intervening years have questioned its literary merits, as the prose, tone, rhythm and level of research are all exceptional. Instead, the common reaction is to remark on how utterly depraved the Wests were, to which there is no response other than a simple nod of agreement.

But Burn walks backwards from the court case where he first encountered the sordid details of perhaps Britain’s most diabolical crimes, back beyond the bodies buried beneath the concrete of 25 Cromwell Street, and through the lives of this pathetic pairing to hack away at the roots that run deep into the Gloucestershire and Herefordshire soil. (Pity the pretty village of Much Marcle, whose name is forever tainted through association with the beginnings of Fred’s two-decade killing spree.)

In the family histories of Fred West and Rosemary Letts – hard existences lived in rural poverty that read like Thomas Hardy scripting Deliverance – Burn found legacies of brutality that suggested that, sometimes, people are products of their environments. Not all victims become aggressors – but sometimes, the beaten dog bites back, twice as hard. Burn’s uncovering of the sexual deviance, chaos and violence of the couple’s early lives adds a dimension to the story that was rarely seen in the swathes of sensationalist tabloid reporting of a case that dominated the daily papers from the arrest of Fred in February 1994, to Rose’s conviction for 10 murders in November 1995.

Yet Burn does not evince sympathy for the pair. He merely builds a layered story, voice upon voice, vice upon vice, to present the facts. But he does so with a sharply focused sense of place; of rural attitudes, old ways, West Country accents and in Fred’s distinctive way of speaking, a repetitious and semi-literate rearranging of words that seem to come out, as they say, back asswards, a voice that once heard is never forgotten. In any other circumstance we might say there is almost a poetry to it, but in the mouths of Fred and Rose, the Gloucester accent becomes malevolent. To recognise this and then capture it on paper so compellingly requires a writer of the highest – and bravest – order.

Burn himself did not emerge from this book unscathed. How could he? This account cannot be reversed, rubbed out or forgotten, for the writer or reader alike. We know that he often woke from nightmares in the deepest blue moments of night, shaking, sweating, traumatised by the undertaking. Haunted by the type of murderers who we thought only existed on remote farms in far-flung American backwaters, relics of the past with double-barrelled first names, forever lost in the vastness of a continent, Burn vowed never to write anything as psychically destructive.

But this is an utterly English story, of a grubby nation laden with the symbols of an older age, a world of country lanes and DIY, fizzy pints, roadworks and five-bar gates, Portakabins, contact mags and hitchhikers, toolboxes and Transit vans, sadism and sour milk, abortions and secrets buried literally beneath fenceposts and knock-off concrete, the bones of the lost left there to one day be excavated and remembered and honoured. Cromwell Street: even the name is steeped in the history of this strange island of ours. Burn journeyed to the dark side and reported back for those who dared to delve into his findings. If anything, Happy Like Murderers is a work of exorcism, a raising and banishing of ghosts, a catharsis for an entire country. And, undoubtedly, a work of genius.

• Benjamin Myers’ latest book is The Offing (Bloomsbury). Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers: The True Story of Fred and Rosemary West is reissued on 3 October (Faber).