Technical Difficulties

The Bell Tower: The Case of Jack the Ripper Finally Solved... in San Francisco by Robert Graysmith

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
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Ripperology: A Study Of The World's First Serial Killer And A Literary Phenomenon by Robin Odell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have tried and tried, and I can't think of a better word to describe this book than "charming." Which seems so wrong in the context of the Whitechapel Murders and Jack the Ripper. But Odell is not writing about Jack the Ripper, exactly. He's writing about the people who write about Jack the Ripper, what they write, and why, and considering the crazy theories that have been put forward in the last century, Odell's wry, generous, thoughtful voice is charming, like a Virgil to lead the reader patiently and clear-headedly through the Inferno of Jack the Ripper Studies, otherwise known as Ripperology.

Odell is himself a major contributor in the field, so he knows the ins and outs of the community of Ripperology very well. He doesn't explain the actual historical crimes and investigations as well as Philip Sugden or Neil R.A. Bell, and the occasional circumstances of the book's production (the Kent State University Press asked him to write about the relationship between American Ripperologists and British Ripperologists for their imaginatively titled "True Crime Series") create an odd, intermittent emphasis on what the Americans happened to be thinking but he's very good at timelines and cross-correlations and using them to poke holes in various whacked-out theories. (His lack of patience for Patricia Cornwell made me very happy.)

This is an excellent overview of the evolution of the historiography of Jack the Ripper, and a great way to get the gist of books you (a) most likely can't find and (b) most likely don't want to have to wade through (the elaborate castles-in-the-air accusing the Duke of Clarence, Walter Sickert (with or without Sir William Gull), James Maybrick, and a number of other unlikely suspects), but that are important artifacts in the history of this particular and very narrow field of criminology.



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Capturing Jack the Ripper: In the Boots of a Bobby in Victorian London by Neil Bell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Bell is not a graceful writer, but he conveys his information clearly. He is a sane and responsible Ripperologist--meaning that he assesses evidence logically, refers generally to "the Whitechapel murders" to avoid questions about which women are "canonical" Jack-the-Ripper victims and which aren't, and regards all letters, chalked messages, pieces of kidney, and other communications alleged to be from Jack the Ripper with healthy skepticism--and has done a great deal of research into the lives of ordinary bobbies, specifically in H Division (Whitechapel), but more generally in the Metropolitan and City Police. Questions about uniforms, about training, about what a constable's "beat" actually consisted of, about the likely career path (you could rise up steadily through the ranks as long as you didn't trip yourself up by getting sacked for being drunk on duty--which happened a lot), the procedure for interviewing witnesses, communications between Scotland Yard and individual stations, what happened when someone was arrested for drunk and disorderly, where the chinks were for corruption to creep in. He goes into detail about Sir Charles Warren's rise and fall (including some incidents I had never read about before), and throughout he presents the Whitechapel murders as much as possible as they were experienced by the police of London.

Highly recommended for anyone researching--for whatever purpose--the police of late Victorian London.



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Jack the Ripper by Andrew Cook

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


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Flanders, Judith. The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. 2011. New York: Thomas Dunne Books-St. Martin's Press, 2013.

Tucher, Andie. Froth and Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

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This is another inadvertant pairing, but even aside from the part where both Flanders and Tucher are talking about murder, they're both talking about popular culture in the nineteenth century and the way the snowballing literacy rate created popular print culture. And how popular print culture addressed the phenomenon of murder.

Tucher is interested in a very narrow window: 1836 to 1841 in New York, from the murder of Helen Jewett by Frank Robinson to the murder of Samuel Adams by John Colt. She is particularly interested in the way these two murders were reported by James Gordon Bennett and the New York Herald and the development of the "objective" style of newspaper reporting. I have some problems with the motivations she ascribes to Bennett (mostly in that I'm not sure he was as self aware as she thinks he was), and it turned out in the last chapter that she was aiming for an argument about journalism that I don't agree with, but the part about the history of the penny press in New York was excellent.

Flanders' is a much larger book, in every sense of the word, larger in scope, larger in outlook, larger in physical dimensions (556 pages vs. 257). Ignore the pretentious title (and the doubly pretentious sub-title): nowhere in her argument does Flanders claim that the Victorians "invented" murder, nor that they "created modern crime." The Invention of Murder is half an overview of the famous murders of the nineteenth century in England, from the Ratcliffe Highway murders to Jack the Ripper. (Although, oddly, Charles Bravo is nowhere to be found.) The other half is an exhaustive teasing out of what happened to those murders (those murderers and those victims) as they were swallowed by the increasingly insatiable maw of Victorian print culture, and the particular ways in which they were fictionalized. Broadsides, pamphlets, newspapers, penny-bloods (later called penny-dreadfuls), novels, plays, puppet shows, waxwork exhibits; she even notes racehorces and greyhounds named for murderers. She also follows the unfolding of detective fiction as a genre and the development of the institution of the police. And if nothing else will convince you of the inadvisability of time travel, the utterly horrific standards of justice in nineteenth-century England should do the trick.

This is a very good book, very well-written, very entertaining. If you're interested at all in the process by which fact becomes fiction, it is endlessly fascinating. In the cases where I know enough to tell, she seems to have her facts straight. (She gets some details wrong about Jack the Ripper, but everybody gets some details wrong about Jack the Ripper, and it's mean to cavil.) I inevitably disagree with some points of her interpretation, but nothing that really gets in the way.

This is not a true-crime book. Flanders pays attention to the victims and the murderers (and the victims of legal murder), but she's interested more in the cultural transmission of their stories than she is in trying to uncover the truth (or "truth," if you're feeling particularly skeptical today) about the murder of Francis Saville Kent, for instance, or Adelaide Bartlett's husband*, or the Marrs and the Williamsons back in 1811. The historiography of murder, rather than the history.

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*Frederick Bartlett died from swallowing liquid chloroform. The general consensus is his wife murdered him, but nobody knows how the hell she got him to swallow the stuff.

Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1994. [library]

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This is the best book on Jack the Ripper I have read thus far. Sugden can lay out a clear, coherent narrative of what we know about each crime, he is adamant about relying on primary sources, and when he doesn't know something, he says so flat out. He treats everything we "know" about the identity of Jack the Ripper with rigorous skepticism (including, thank goodness, the claims of Sir Robert Anderson that seem to have hypnotized so many Ripper historians), and the only time I caught him yearning, like a dog on a leash, after a crazy-ass theory was at the very end of the book.

( cut for Ripperology )

There are, of course, criticisms I can make. ( cut for more Ripperology )

But the only one I can think of that actually affects whether or not this is a good gateway for people interested in Jack the Ripper is that, by the nature of the historiography of Jack the Ripper, Sugden spends a lot of time demonstrating that earlier historians are wrong. He has to, because so many of their claims have become things "everybody knows" about Jack the Ripper. But if you don't know the earlier theories, you may be baffled as to why the various subjects even come up. All historiography is a conversation, but the historiography of the Ripper is a party in an over-crowded room, where somebody starting shouting half an hour ago, and now everybody's talking too loudly. It can be hard to hear anything over the din.

Douglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. The Cases That Haunt Us. New York: Lisa Drew-Scribner, 2000. [library]

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FBI profiling techniques applied to famous unsolved (or dubiously solved) crimes: Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden, Bruno Hauptmann, the Zodiac, JonBenet Ramsey, the Black Dahlia, the Boston Strangler, and Laurie Bembenek. (It's odd, looking at that sentence, how some crimes are known, in shorthand, for their victim, some for the criminal, and some for the person accused. And the Lindbergh case is immediately recognizable from both sides.) Douglas and Olshaker are very rational, very commonsensical, and fundamentally their technique is to say, This is the crime. These are the requirements for a perpetrator. This is how we might (in 2000) go about catching such a perpetrator. This is how the accused does, or does not, meet these requirements. They figure Lizzie did it; that Hauptmann did it, but didn't act alone; and that accusing JonBenet's parents is nonsense.

This was a good read, very engaging, well laid out as a narrative, very convincing. My only complaint is ( cut for Ripperology )

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Otherwise, excellent book. Recommended if you're interested in criminology at all.