Whitechapel, London, the dying days of summer 1888. Somewhere in the shadows of London's notorious slums, among a motley collection of "unfortunates", recent immigrants, money-lenders, down-and-outs, drunks, drug addicts and those coming to find their enjoyment among these classes a woman is found brutally murdered. Over the coming months, she will be joined by several others - all of them prostitutes, all of them killed brutally. Finally, on 9 November of this same year, one final, almost cinematically vile, murder will be committed and then - at least according to most sources - the fiend is heard from no more.
Such are the bare facts about one of history's most infamous serial killers, Jack the Ripper. Onto this sketch, over the years, have been embroidered all manner of theories, counter-theories, and facts and fictions, giving rise to the concept of "Ripperology", a hobby which I must confess to participating in. The "Canonical Five" murder victims (some would suggest six or even seven victims, and still others contend that there were fewer, but most specialists agree on five) are probably the most well-known Victorian prostitutes, and the minutiae of the life and activities of a wide range of policemen and potential suspects have been scrutinised again and again for more than a century afterwards.
For those keeping score at home, Wikipedia lists more than 100 potential suspects, although I should add that some of these are quite possibly identical figures known by pseudonyms, as Whitechapel was the kind of place where anonymity was a real virtue. While many of these figures, such as Joseph Barnett, Alexander Pedachenko and Severyn Koslowski, are more well known to specialists, there are also names such as Lewis Caroll, the artist Walter Sickert and even the Duke of Clarence on the list, although these tend to be taken less seriously.
It is against this backdrop that we need to consider Maxim Jakubowski's work in collecting 40 short stories - written, it appears, specifically for this volume - on the topic of the Ripper. The majority of the authors aren't names overly familiar to me, although Barbara Nadel and Michael Gregorio both make appearances.
In a collection like this, it's possible to cover almost every base, and that's roughly what happens here. We have aristocratic Rippers, medical Rippers, both likely and unlikely suspects as Rippers, a policeman-Ripper, two or three "supernatural" Rippers and even a couple of crossdressing Rippers. There's even a virtual-reality Ripper, a Ripper on the Titanic, a Ripper in the Klondike Goldfields, a Sherlock-Holmes-unmasks-the-Ripper and a couple of descendants of the Ripper doing their own thing. The only three theories I can't immediately think of making a serious appearance are the thoroughly discredited "Masonic Conspiracy", Conan Doyle's "Jill the Ripper" hobby-horse and the "Sickert-as-Ripper" scenario. This last has probably fallen out of favour following Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer, which is marketed as non-fiction but is realistically a poor attempt at comedy and suggests that Cornwell should stick to her day job.
The authors are a collection of crime, horror and even erotica writers - Nicky Peacock's "Madame X", for example, is what I can only call "erotic horror", which is not something I've met before - as Jakubowski has connections to all three genres. Each definitely puts their own spin on things, and it's quite clear that they've done their research.
Of course, in any collection this large, there will inevitably be some unevenness. There are a number of stories which hint at a solution (people "realise why the killer worked in a certain way", for instance) and then just end at that, and more than a few in which a rather implausible twist-ending is introduced purely as a device to surprise the reader. In one of these cases, a narrator is suddenly revealed to have been unreliable all along and the final two pages feature a range of increasingly implausible actions as a result. A shame, really, as the earlier section of the story built an impressively forboding atmosphere around the concept that another character might just have been descended from the Ripper.
There is also a strong delineation between the British and American authors. The Brits, in general, seem to get the tone just that little bit more right than their cousins tend to. The American authors are often guilty of inserting the odd anachronism into the mouths of the waifs and strays of the East End, or alternatively having them speak in a garbled "Mummerset" accent which just doesn't work either. There are also some unfortunate moments of characters being referred to as the equivalent of "Sir Smith", rather than "Sir John", which really should have been caught somewhere in the editing process.
In fairness, though, there are a few stories which do genuinely work. Rhys Hughes' "The Guided Tour", along with its thematic cousin "Autumn of Terror" by CL Raven are distinctly unnerving in their unwillingness to explain just what the heck's going on (although I can live without Hughes' "metafictional" conceit at the end). "Dear Boss" by Nic Martin is an interesting - albeit clunky towards the end - take on the infamous "Ripper Letters", and Martin Edwards' "Blue Serge" is an unexpected take on both the Ripper and the Dr Crippen cases. As a dyed-in-the-wool Sherlockian, I would be remiss not to mention Paul A Freeman's "The Simple Procedure", which takes the rather hackneyed idea of the iconic fictional detective turning his mind to the iconic real killer and makes an interesting result of it all.
All up, there's enough here for a Ripperologist or casual reader to find something to enjoy. Whether we all need all forty stories, mind you, is perhaps another question. Jakubowski was half of the team behind a Mammoth anthology of essentially the "state of the art" in Ripperology earlier this century, and I suspect that that would be much the better read of the two.
To borrow, but not to own. 2.5 stars.
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