Six for the Ripper!

Just recently I was asked to recommend “the best books on Jack the Ripper,” and my immediate response, I’m almost ashamed to admit, was unabashedly Clintonian: it really depends on what’s meant by “best.” There’ve been thousands of books about the infamous Victorian serial killer who murdered at least five women in one of the most crowded and wretched sections of 1888 London, and this is understandable, considering how endlessly fascinating the whole story is.

Its bare outlines are fairly familiar: in August of 1888, the dead and mutilated body of a woman named Mary Ann Nichols was discovered in the pre-dawn darkness. Her killer had slit her throat, stabbed her, and made what seemed to be tentative moves to disembowel her. A week later the body of Annie Chapman was found – her throat slit, and this time the abdomen had been cut open and the poor woman’s uterus had been removed. Three weeks later, two more victims were found in one night: Elizabeth Stride’s throat had been slit, but there were no other wounds – and only a quarter-hour later, the body of Catherine Eddowes was discovered, its throat slit, its abdomen cut open, the uterus and one kidney missing. The enormous outcry by this point in the public and in the press was only fueled by the many taunting letters sent to London police allegedly by the killer (at least one of the letters came with a bit of human kidney included), and an ominous pattern is clearly developing: the killer is growing more confident in his butchery (the settled theory is that he was interrupted by possible detection before he could mutilate Elizabeth Stride, thus explaining the two killings in one night). A week after the Stride and Eddowes murders, that confidence was given horrifying free reign: unlike the previous victims, the fifth “canonical” murder, that of Mary Kelly, happened in a closed and private room, with nothing to hurry or interrupt the killer. He slit her throat so energetically he nearly decapitated her, and he eviscerated her, and he cut her face off, and he left with her heart. Even after an intervening century of unprecedented violence, the police crime-scene photo still has the power to shock.

Then, according to the official narrative, the killings stopped. Nobody was ever caught for the crimes, and so a social phenomenon was born. Books and articles began pouring from the world’s printing presses, and they’ve never stopped. TV shows, movies, and graphic novels have added to the pile, to the point where “the best books on Jack the Ripper” necessitates clarification: what kind of Ripper book are you looking for?

If you’re looking for lurid storytelling, you’ve certainly come to the right place! The penny dreadful accounts of the Ripper began even before his “canonical” crime wave ended (that persistent word derives from the fact that “Ripperologists” have all but universally agreed that the killer had victims before and after the “canonical” five, and some of their thinking on the matter is quite convincing), and the 20^th century saw no shortage of them. The best collection of Jack the Ripper short stories is probably 1988′s Red Jack edited by Martin Greenberg, Charles Waugh, and Frank McSherry. Red Jack includes stories from the likes of Ellery Queen, Ramsey Campbell, and even Harlan Ellsion, whose thrilling story “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” is the highlight of the book. And in terms of longer fiction, I’d give the prize to The Night of the Ripper, a 1984 novel by the author of Psycho, Robert Bloch. He sticks very close to the official facts of the case, and as he has the dogged Inspector Abberline track down all possible suspects, the net widens to include both former Royal physical Doctor William Gull but also Queen Victoria’s dreamy young grandson, Prince Albert Victor. I re-read Bloch’s novel just this morning as I was ruminating about the Ripper case, and I’m happy to report that the verdict of the august Washington Post Book World back in ’84 is actually correct: it holds up considerably better than Psycho ever has.

Of course, fiction is hardly ever the best way to learn about history (with a few exceptions that warrant a special Stevereads post of their own!), so the question extends to “what are the best histories of Jack the Ripper?” And even there, the selection is so dauntingly vast that certain specifications have to be added. History-writing, after all, has as broad a spectrum as any other kind of writing. But say you’re up for nonfiction accounts every bit as lurid and purply as anything offered on the fiction side of the ledger – well, if that’s the case, you shouldn’t miss Frank Spiering’s breathlessly hysterical 1978 book Prince Jack, which, as you might guess from the title, puts forward the theory that Jack the Ripper was Queen Victoria’s grandson, known as “Prince Eddy.” And although the theory is absurd on its face (of all the possible candidates, Prince Albert Victor is the least likely – might as well finger Woodrow Wilson), Spiering pursues it with a vigor bordering on mania; you aren’t five pages into his book before you’re encountering offenses against every single one of the canons of ethical history-writing. Wild suppositions are presented as facts, facts themselves are suppressed, misrepresented, or omitted depending on how friendly they are to the author’s pre-conceived theory, and huge swaths of dialogue (spoken and internal) are simply created out of whole cloth. It’s sins like these that have prompted some fuss-potty schoolmarms to give this book only one star on Goodreads, but this isn’t fair: once you grant the underlying ridiculousness of Spiering’s underlying idea and simply read his book for the pure sudsy pleasure of the thing, it’s perfectly possible to have yourself at least a three-star time.

Considerably better than Spiering’s book is Tom Cullen’s 1965 book When London Walked in Terror, which the book-hack for the dear old Boston Herald Traveler called “a rattling good yarn.” Cullen’s book is a proper, documented history of the entire Ripper case, and despite its grabby title, it’s a good and serious work. And if you’re in the mood for a chorus of historical voices, you can’t do better than 1999′s The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Nathan Braund, part of Carroll & Graf’s generally fantastic “Mammoth Book” library (how much pleasure these books have given me over the years! The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Battles, The Mammoth Book of Private Lives, and the list of gems goes on). Here our editors have assembled some first-rate contributions to the Ripper library, from William Beadle’s “The Real Jack the Ripper” to Bruce Paley’s gripping (but clearly mis-titled) “The Facts Speak for Themselves” to Colin Wilson’s lively, terrific “A Life in Ripperology.” Jakubowski and Braund also present a very handy collection of original documents and a well-grounded chronology of the (again mis-titled) ‘undisputed facts of the case.’

And as to the answer to the original question’s most likely meaning – what is the single best history of Jack the Ripper, well, that’s a tough call between some excellent contenders, like Philip Sugden’s The Complete History of Jack the Ripper and Paul Begg’s Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History, but if pressed for one book and one book only, I’d have to give the prize – for sheer comprehensiveness and a very readable understated prose style – to Donald Rumbelow’s great book The Complete Jack the Ripper.

And who knows what future volumes – of all these types! – are even now making their way to the presses? Jack the Ripper was recently in the news again, with a Ripperologist claiming to have lock-solid DNA evidence (from a shawl allegedly owned by Catherine Eddowes) identifying the killer once and for all. And no matter how convincing that evidence turns out to be under independent analysis, something tells me this case will never actually be closed; in the public mind, Jack the Ripper could always be anybody, and besides, Ripperologists don’t get to be Ripperologists by being easily satisfied. Let the manhunt continue!