By Peter Stuart
Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne
and Jack Steel)
You’ll be relieved to hear that this week I’m not going to
be banging on about the parlous state of publishing and the uncertainties for
the future of the industry of which I am a very small part. You might be less
relieved to learn that I’m going to spend my time telling you about my latest
book.
The Ripper Secret is my second book for
Simon & Schuster and is, like the previous novel The Titanic Secret, set around a series of real-world events, in
this case the brutal killings perpetrated in the Whitechapel area of London at
the end of the nineteenth century by an unknown murderer who acquired the hideously
appropriate nickname ‘Jack the Ripper’. What I’ve always found interesting
about this particular serial killer – he almost certainly wasn’t the first man
who met this definition by embarking on a killing spree over a period of time,
but he’s definitely the most famous – is that even today, almost a century and
a half after the events which cast a cloak of terror over the East End of London,
his actions still throw a shadow over the city.
People still
travel to Whitechapel and the surrounding areas, looking for the streets where
the Ripper walked in search of his victims, and organized tours of the murder
sites – or rather what remain of the geographical locations because development
in this part of London has hidden almost all of the sites under new roads and
buildings – are still a popular tourist attraction.
And not only that, but almost every year a new non-fiction
book is published which positively identifies yet another new subject as Jack
the Ripper. The one characteristic most of these books seem to share is that
the author has a very clear idea of exactly who the Ripper was, and then spends
almost the entire book cherry-picking those pieces of evidence which support
this contention, ignoring those which flatly contradict it and, in some cases,
invent ‘facts’ from dubious sources to reinforce his or her argument. Very few
books even attempt to carry out a proper and unbiased investigation of the
Ripper killings and then come to a reasonable conclusion about the identity of
the perpetrator.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my novel does neither, precisely
because it is a novel. I am not attempting
in this book to provide compelling evidence that my chosen subject was Jack the Ripper, although
suggestions have been made in the past that he could have been. Nor am I trying
to be selective in choosing which facts will be a part the story. Instead, I’ve
tried to weave a believable plot around the Ripper killings, while sticking as
rigidly as possible to the historical reality of that dark time in east London.
While I was researching the historical background of
this book, a number of questions occurred to me, questions which very few
people writing on the subject have ever attempted to answer. Most books have
attempted simply to identify the murderer and little else.
In particular, few people ever seemed to have
considered the following:
·
Why did the killings start?
·
Why did the mutilations get progressively more
brutal with each succeeding murder?
·
Why did the killings stop?
·
And what possible motive was driving the
murderer?
I don’t pretend that my novel actually identifies the
real Jack the Ripper, but what it does do is provide logical and believable
answers to those questions.
As to the actual identity of this most notorious of
all serial killers, I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about that.
The Ripper
Secret will be published by Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom on
11 October 2012.
You can contact me at:
Twitter: @pss_author
Facebook: Peter Stuart Smith
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