Review: Trow, Interpreting the Ripper Letters

[truepenny]

Interpreting the Ripper Letters: Missed Clues and Reflections on Victorian Society by M.J. Trow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the kind of book I've come to expect from M. J. Trow: interesting, easy to read, refreshingly commonsensical (a rare trait in a book about Jack the Ripper), slapdash in the research. He also loses points for being the kind of guy who thinks women accuse men of sexual harassment for fun, and in general he's pretty you-kids-get-off-my-lawn about the 21st century, but he makes a surprisingly cogent point at the end, that the people who wrote Jack the Ripper letters were basically the same thing as internet trolls.

Trow does not for a moment believe that the Jack the Ripper letters were written by the Whitechapel murderer (I forgive him SO MANY THINGS for his take on Patricia Cornwell), so his analysis of them is really an analysis of the darker corners of the public reaction to the murders. Since I've read Evans and Skinner's excellent Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, there weren't any big surprises for me: the people who claim to be Jack the Ripper, the people who claim to know who Jack the Ripper is, the people who are so chaotic and dysfunctional it's hard to tell WHAT they're claiming, if anything. Trow also traces the lines of misinformation that start the instant the police decide the Dear Boss letter is genuine and goes into some of the wackier "solutions," like Stephen Knight's infamous conspiracy theory involving Sir William Gull, Walter Sickert, and the Freemasons, and an idea apparently floating around the internet right now that Lewis Carroll was the murderer. And he talks about other serial killers who did write to the newspapers and the police, like Neill Cream and the Zodiac, although he doesn't really come up with any clear-cut explanation of what he's trying to prove.

I don't know how you ought to organize a book about the Ripper letters, but Trow did not pick the best way, since I'm hard-pressed to identify what his organizational principle was. Insofar as a book 179 pages long can feel meandering, this one did. But it was a very down-to-earth and rational discussion of an extremely irrational crop of letters.

Three and a half stars, round up to four.



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