Yesterday Simon & Schuster published my latest book – The Ripper Secret – and the initial
marketing push looks as if it’s been quite successful, with the novel being
available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As
well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house is also
broadcasting a podcast I recorded on its website and featuring a short article
I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the ‘Dark Pages’ section.
It looks
as if the timing has been quite providential as well, with the second of a
two-part BBC documentary being broadcast last night, the same day as the book’s
publication, and with the level of interest in this most notorious of all
serial killers still being remarkably high. When I input the search term ‘Jack
the Ripper’ into Amazon, it came up with just under 3,400 items, an astonishing
number of books and films bearing in mind that his killing spree took place
almost a century and a half ago. Doing the same thing on Google produced almost
ten million hits.
The BBC
documentary was interesting, though the conclusions it came to were somewhat
predictable and – like a lot of the things the BBC produces – very selective. Their
principal suspects were Montague John Druitt and a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski,
though no believable evidence was advanced to indicate that either man could
have been Jack the Ripper. And it’s worth pointing out that in all over 200 different
suspects have been suggested over the years, and some 30 of these have been
seriously considered, ranging from the sublime (Prince Albert Victor with or
without the assistance of Queen Victoria’s Physician-In-Ordinary Sir William
Gull) to the ridiculous (‘Jill the Ripper’ or the ‘mad midwife’).
The documentary
also provided reconstructions of some of the events, and these were not always
as accurate as they certainly should have been. For example, when Israel
Schwartz witnessed an altercation between a man and a woman who might have been
Elizabeth Stride, he also described another man on the opposite side of the
street, a man who then began following him. In the BBC’s version, this man didn’t
appear at all, and the scene showed Schwartz passing very close by the arguing
couple and getting an excellent look at the man involved, which certainly wasn’t
the case according to his testimony.
They also
were highly selective when considering the medical evidence. With a single
exception, every doctor who examined any of the victims of the Ripper concluded
that the killer had to have had at least some medical knowledge. The single
exception was Dr Thomas Bond, who stated that he didn’t believe the murderer
had any surgical ability, but conspicuously failed to explain how the Ripper
had managed to remove Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney without damaging any of
the surrounding organs in complete darkness in Mitre Square in under 15 minutes,
a difficult and complex surgical procedure even on a corpse.
With
regard to the killing of Annie Chapman, the divisional police surgeon Dr George
Bagster Phillips stated that if he had performed the mutilations to her body,
even in the well-lit and ordered surroundings of an operating theatre, the
procedure would have taken him at least an hour. His views were echoed by the
other doctors involved in examining the victims.
Probably
unsurprisingly, the BBC ignored all the evidence recorded by every other doctor
at the time, and simply took Bond’s statement as gospel, claiming that the
killings showed no medical knowledge or ability whatsoever, presumably so that
they could offer Druitt and Kosminski – neither of whom had medical training –
as believable suspects.
Personally,
I believe that it is undeniable the Jack the Ripper – whoever he was – at the
very least had some medical and surgical training, and that of course would
narrow the field of suspects very considerably and also, incidentally,
eliminate at a stroke the most popular contenders.
The man
who was Jack the Ripper in my novel, on the other hand, is a far better fit
than most. Records from this period are notoriously patchy and incomplete, but
there is evidence to suggest that this man was living in London at the time of
the killings, had trained and then worked as a surgeon, and had a history of
violence against women, with quite probably at least one murder behind him
before he arrived in the city. He is also one of the least known of all the
Ripper suspects.
The Ripper Secret is of course a novel,
but the story is tightly woven around the killings which are described as
accurately as possible after such a passage of time. I’ve taken considerable
care to make sure that the facts are right, and in my opinion the story does
work as a possible explanation for the murders. In particular, it provides logical
answers to six questions which almost no non-fiction writer has ever managed resolved
satisfactorily:
·
Why did the murders start?
·
Why did the mutilations get progressively more
severe?
·
Why were there two murders on one night?
·
Why did the murders stop?
·
Why did Sir Charles Warren resign simultaneously
with the final killing?
·
What was the significance of the geographical locations
of the murders?
If you read the book, let me know what you think.
You can contact me at:
Twitter:
@pss_author
Facebook:
Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs: The
Curzon Group
Website link: Brit
Writers
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