UBC: M. J. Trow, The Thames Torso Murders

[truepenny]

The Thames Torso Murders by M.J. Trow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars




I'm of two minds about M. J. Trow. On the one hand, he is clearly extremely intelligent and his analytical abilities are superb--as is the clear, sharp way he swings the sword of common sense in discussions of the possible identity of Jack the Ripper. On the other, he is sloppy as a researcher and he has a sort of P. T. Barnum sense of showmanship that for me does nothing but get in the way.

After the disorganization caused by Trow sacrificing clarity for a good hook, the worst problem I had with this book was that, although the various locations along the Thames are critical to the narrative, there is no map. For someone unfamiliar with London, this makes the book extremely difficult to follow.

With that said:

This is one of only two books devoted to the Thames Torso Murders. (The other is The Thames Torso Murders of Victorian Britain (2002), which apparently is committed to the ridiculous thesis that the Thames Torso Murderer and Jack the Ripper were the same person.) It is made unnecessarily confusing by Trow's choice to start in 1887, work his way up to 1889, and then go back to 1873, 1874, and 1884. This is obviously a strategy deployed to make the most of the Jack the Ripper connection, and it's unnecessary, especially since Trow is very clear on the fact that the Thames Torso Murderer was not Jack the Ripper: these were men with very different modi operandi at basically every point you can think of, and again I appreciate Trow's basic common sense in refusing to be swayed by the chronological coincidence.

The Thames Torso Murderer murdered and dismembered seven (eight?) women between 1873 and 1889. Of those seven, only the last of them, Elizabeth Jackson, was ever identified. Trow describes the progress of the crimes and the fruitless investigations, and continues throughout to put the Thames Torso Murderer in his proper context in late Victorian London, as for example: "The pickle jar found on the 13th [June] had no connection with the Thames mystery. It did contain the body of a foetus, but in [Dr] Kempster's opinion, had not come from the murdered woman" (64). Trow has an excellent later chapter entitled "Men Behaviing Madly," in which he discusses all the other potentially homicidal lunatics wandering around London in this same general time period--men whom we know about because they have been unearthed as possible Jacks the Ripper: Aaron Davis Cohen, Thomas Hayne Cutbush, Oswald Puckeridge, Jacob Isenschmid, Aaron Kosminski, Charles Ludwig, William Henry Pigott, John Sanders, G Wentworth Bell Smith, James Kelly, Thomas Neill Cream (actually a serial killer), George Chapman (actually a serial killer). The Thames Torso Murderer is terrifying--no idea who he is, no idea where he killed his victims or where he actually dropped their bodies into the river, no idea how he chose them or lured them in--but so is the world in which he lived. The foreground doesn't exist without the background.

(Victorian London sometimes seems like it must be made up, except that if you tried to put it in a novel, no one would believe you.)

Rather like Jack the Ripper, the Thames Torso Murderer does not inhabit a story with a beginning, middle, and end. We begin in medias res (with Martha Tabram or Polly Nichols, depending on your theory about the Ripper, and with the lady whose body--including the skin of her face and scalp--was found starting at Battersea on 5 September 1873) we careen or meander from murder to murder, and we don't have an ending so much as a trail going cold after Mary Jane Kelly (or Alice Mackenzie or Rose Mylett or Frances Coles, again depending on your theory) and after Elizabeth Jackson and her 7-month foetus. We know, and can deduce, even less about the Thames Torso Murderer than we can about Jack. I like Trow's theory that the Thames Torso Murderer was a cat's-meat man--and Trow includes a description of the horrifying end waiting for the some 26,000 a year of London's cab horses that were sent to the slaughterhouse (hello, Black Beauty)--but even there, even if that's true, there were hundreds of cat's-meat men in London (per Mayhew), and we don't know anything more about them than that.

As with Jack, there aren't any answers, just the evidence the murderer chose to leave behind.




IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the Thames Torso Murders, I have to recommend this book because it's one of only two, and it's not trying to make the Thames Torso Murders fit into an artificial pattern (such as suggesting that this murderer and Jack the Ripper are the same person).

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in Victorian London more generally--and have a very strong stomach--I also recommend it, because of the superb job Trow does in evoking the context of these murders. It's a view of London you aren't otherwise going to get.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED in the history of serial killers, I recommend this book, if for no other reason than that our view of the Thames Torso Murderer has been so obstructed by Rippermania that we barely even know he exists.

OTHERWISE, this book is probably not for you.



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Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The TTM was one of the historical details I wish I'd been able to fit into With Fate Conspire, in part because (as you say) he's so overshadowed by Rippermania. Alas, no room for it.

[sovay]

I didn't even know about the Thames Torso Murderer, so thank you. Is it usually the case that the murders are folded into discussion of Jack the Ripper, so I wouldn't have seen them because Ripperology is not my thing?

victorian london was full of whackjobs

Can't argue.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Essentially, yes.

Nobody except Trow and Gordon has written anything about the Thames Torso Murderer, so it's mostly just mentions of the two or three of his victims whom contemporaries thought might have been Ripper victims.

[sovay]

Nobody except Trow and Gordon has written anything about the Thames Torso Murderer, so it's mostly just mentions of the two or three of his victims whom contemporaries thought might have been Ripper victims.

I find that fascinating, and also very strange. Were the murders treated as part of the Ripper pattern at the time? Or is this interpretation strictly imposed by hindsight? (I can see that the range of dates is much wider, if nothing else.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't think that the torso murders were recognized as part of a pattern in the same way that we immediately recognize them today. Those that occurred at the right time were definitely drawn into the Ripper's orbit (in much the same way that the serial poisoner George Chapman was--and is--considered a Ripper suspect simply because he was in Whitechapel at the right time and he was demonstrably a sociopath. Nothing could be farther from Jack's MO than Chapman's and nothing less likely than that Chapman was Jack. But he's still given serious consideration because he was a serial killer who was Johnny-on-the-spot--and as identity theories go, that's one of the most rational.

(This is the sort of thing that makes me value M. J. Trow's gold-standard common sense.)