Stop an American or two on the street and it’s unlikely they’ll recognize the name Myra Hindley, let alone know what she did. In Britain, however, where at the time of her death in 2002 she was the country’s longest-imprisoned female convict, Hindley earned such enduring popular contempt that following her 1966 murder conviction pretty much no one ever named a daughter Myra again. Rupert Thomson’s gloomy, reflective new novel “Death of a Murderer” (Knopf, 225 pages, $23) uses the figure of this cultural bogey woman to frame a smaller fiction that, while written with evident craft, cannot help but be overshadowed by the invoked history.

Hindley, for Americans unschooled in the history of infamous crime, was partly responsible for the killings in the 1960s that became known as the “Moors murders.” She helped her boyfriend Ian Brady, with whom she was deeply infatuated, kidnap, torture, and kill five children, and although Brady was the primary actor, it was Hindley who drew the public’s more lasting hatred. And not just hatred but incredulity: How could she have gone along with it? As Mr. Thomson writes, the British public was fascinated with her because “she had shown them what a human being was capable of.”

“Death of a Murderer” takes place shortly after Hindley’s death at the age of 60. Billy Tyler, a forlorn middle-aged constable, has been assigned to guard her body on the “bleak and raw” November night before she’s to be buried; he’ll be alone in the mortuary — “this rough-and-ready space, so stark and practical, and so neglected” — with Hindley’s corpse for nearly twelve hours. It’s a prospect that alarms Billy’s wife, Sue, who doesn’t want him to go: “What upset her was the contact with evil, the soaking up of some dark influence—the shadow that might cast over their lives.” Given the thoroughness with which Hindley’s specter infected the consciousness of Britain, Sue’s concerns don’t seem all that unreasonable.

Despite her ghoulish presence, the novel ultimately turns out not to be about Hindley all that much. The infamous murderess appears from time to time as a ghost or a figment of Billy’s imagination, benignly ashing her cigarettes on the mortuary floor and making surly conversation, but one soon realizes that Mr. Thomson has summoned her as a mere ficelle: She’s not there to reveal anything about herself but to prompt Billy, to nudge him into reminiscence. And reminisce he does. We learn of his awkward childhood in a town with a “brine reservoir,” his worshipful allegiance to an older boy (“You did everything he said,” Hindley observes, not so subtly evoking her own relationship with Ian Brady. “Even dogs aren’t that obedient”), his affair with a woman named Venetia, his marriage to Sue, and the birth of their Down’s-afflicted daughter, and, cumulatively, his dim anguish over a life of disappointed hopes.

Mr. Thomson is a very skilled writer, as he’s shown before—particularly in his strange novel “The Book of Revelation.” In “Death of a Murderer,” he frequently conjures menace out of nothing: “Above the car’s roof was a row of trees, arranged along the horizon….in the slowly fading light they looked like an ancient curse written in a language he could not decipher.” And he can make a reader queasy even when sketching something that’s supposed to be beautiful, as when he describes the lovely Venetia’s “hair flowing over her shoulders, like black treacle poured out of a tin…”

But the construction of “Death of a Murderer” is unwisely calibrated: The fictions that animate Billy Tyler’s character don’t stand a chance against the immovable facts of Myra Hindley’s crime. Hindley’s presence (she’s never explicitly named, only referred to euphemistically, perhaps in an effort to dilute the sheer potency of her presence) overwhelms the rest, and Billy’s life comes to feel incidental. The relationship of her story to his often seems arbitrary: the juxtaposition is hardly revelatory and is rarely affecting.

It is compelling, though, how Mr. Thomson seems to connect Hindley’s crimes to a human predisposition to subjugate the weak—more specifically, to the quiet idea that children are people to whom things can be done. Almost everyone bears memories of some youthful trauma, but Mr. Thomson has a particular wariness about fatherhood. (It’s believed that Hindley’s father beat her and her mother.) Billy’s father disappeared. Sue’s father is a dapper swine who abandoned her early on but appears later, leering at his Asian escort and asking Billy, “You ever had a Korean?” Venetia’s father molested her and her sister. Billy himself has very conflicted feelings about his daughter. “Fathers,” Billy thinks, “they were like the poppies that appeared in the summer, so vivid against the new ripe yellow of the corn, so handsome, but if you pressed their petals between finger and thumb the red went black and wet.”

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Louis Auchincloss. His first novel, “Fires,” was published by Impetus Press.