Jack of all Trades: The Untold Lives of Jack the Ripper

 This is an unusual book. I'll say that from the outset. It's a pigtail pull, a wedgie, chock full o' purple nurple prose. This book is a tease, a tug, an inkblot flicked from a ruler. It's having a pop. What this book isn't is about Jack the Ripper. I mean, he's in it, or she's in it. Their bloody wake through the autumn of 1888 is revealed in pitiless, forensic detail. The same few events pored over again and again, examined from every angle, each bare fact given a dozen different interpretations, prompting diverse motivations. But really, its a book about Jack's legacy: not serial-killers but serial-killer detectives, positing their convoluted, tortuously argued suspects, whose only qualifications appear to be being alive at the time of the crimes. (Though this book goes one better - one of the suspects was not actually born until long after Mary Kelly breathed her last). Beyond that, anything goes: royalty, midwifery, eminent surgeons, coach drivers, visiting American actors, people living in Liverpool, depressed barristers, painters, men in aprons, poisoners, a bloke standing near one of the bodies, visiting American murderers, (who were in America at the time) a cabal of Masons in the government, madmen from Eastern Europe, David Warner, escaping to 1970's San Francisco. 

Alright, no serious Ripperologist would go for David Warner. He's pursued by H.G.Wells (Malcolm MacDowell) into the future via a working time machine for some hilarious fish out of water antics, plus murders. That's implausible. But beyond that, anyone seems fair game, as the search for the murderer of these five (more probably six) women devolves into sophistry, into a sort of parlour game, debated by donnish chaps in Bakelite specs, jockeying to be the cleverest boy in the room. Until, Hallie Rubenhold's The Five came out, no one ever talked about the victims. They were routinely referred to as "whores" and "alcoholics", as though they arrived in The Abyss fully formed, just waiting for their fateful meeting with Jack. They were his material, the medium he used for his art, the stepping stone necessary for the real fun: guessing who the bugger was, and the more outlandish, the more cleverly argued the better. They're barristers summing up, pleased with their evidence, unconcerned as to whether their charge is guilty or not guilty, happy only that they're convincing, that they'll win. 

This book does all of that, brilliantly. Working backwards from the premise of an unlikely suspect, these "essayists" supply motivation and locality, in most cases, but more interestingly a unique perspective on the case, using the psychology of the subject, the social conditions of their world, their ultimate goals and how the murder of these five women figured in their known stories: the gaps in their diaries, the strange coincidences, the skewed psychological imperatives that caused them to kill and, ultimately, caused them to stop. These are brilliantly argued, in some cases to a breath-taking degree. Queen Victoria and the unborn Hitler, presented her as suspects, may not convince in a literal sense, but one has to admire the Gordian knot of fallacies woven tightly about them. And when they do convince, they convince, as much, if not more than any of the usual gang of idiots: is Henry Ford a less likely suspect than poor maligned Monty Druitt, dead in the Thames with a pocket full of stones and an "I don't want to end up like mother" note. Who's sympathetic here? Poor linseed smelling M.J. or the industrialist monster who turned his workers from men into machines, to bare cogs and wheels, to the pistons and cables we all hide inside. Why wouldn't he want to burst someone himself? To get his hands on the hot pumping engine at the centre of us, the red oil pouring out of us. Of course he would. 

This is an excellent book. A dazzling riposte to arbitrariness of Ripper speculation. Anyone can be named, so everyone can be named. A century of nonsense has been expertly ridiculed. But has editor, Laars Head, with all his sophomoric cleverness, all his cleverly argued snark, revealed more than he intended to? 

Read the Arthur Conan Doyle entry. Watertight. It's all there. The author of Sherlock Holmes, the Cottingley fairies dupe, is the Beast of The Abyss. A.C.D. See?