Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [49]
Robert Bloch remains somewhat of a touchstone when considering the Ripper’s fictional career. He wrote The Will to Kill (1954) in which the protagonist believes that he is responsible for a series of crimes that echo the Whitechapel Murders. In 1967 he contributed the Ripper-in-the-future story ‘A Toy for Juliette’ to Harlan Ellison’s monumental science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions, which tells of a sadistic young woman’s responsibility for many of the notable disappearances throughout history. Unfortunately, the year 1888 means nothing to her and she comes to a satisfactory end. Bloch’s last work on the Ripper was set in 1888. The Night of the Ripper (1984) follows a young doctor and a dyspeptic Inspector Abberline as they attempt to track Jack. They eventually find him to be Dr Pedachenko and a female assistant. One of the least satisfying of Bloch’s psychological thrillers, it has occasional flashes of wit and reasonable pacing, but cannot hold a candle to his short stories. That said, his ear for Cockney dialogue is still better than the Dick-van-Dyke-isms trotted out in Donald McCormick’s The Identity of Jack the Ripper.
Outside of the penny dreadfuls capitalising on the Ripper crimes, there have been plenty of fictional attempts to explore the Autumn of Terror. Theodora Benson’s In the Fourth Ward chillingly relates the real-life killing in Manhattan of the prostitute known as ‘Old Shakespeare’. Ray Russell’s excellent Sagittarius (1962) proposes the Ripper crimes to be perpetrated by Edward Hyde. Hyde in turn has sired a son, who might be responsible for even worse.There was the romance novel Nine Bucks Row (1973, aka Susannah Beware) by TE Huff, in which a young woman suspects the man she is falling in love with is none other than Jack. Anne Perry’s Pentecost Alley (1996) had her protagonist wracked with guilt over the possibility that the wrong man was hanged for being the Ripper, especially as he seems to have returned. Anthony Boucher’s A Kind of Madness (1972) proposes that the Ripper fell victim to the notorious French murderers Michael Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard, warming up for the murder of solicitor Marcel Gouffé that would bring them notoriety.
Other stories, such as Gardner Fox’s Terror over London (1957), John Brooks Barry’s The Michaelmas Girls (1975) and Richard Gordon’s The Private Life of Jack the Ripper (1980) contained fairly straightforward fictionalised retellings of the murders combined with surprise revelations, usually safely placed within the whodunnit formula. Richard Gordon, creator of the Doctor in the House series, built his novel upon solid research about Victorian medical practices. The plot itself is nothing special but there are salutary and disgusting revelations in the background.
The Ripper became the crime and horror writer’s equivalent of the dread ‘dead pet/living pet’ story in sitcoms: something reliable that you could turn to in times of creative hardship. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the countless crime titles in which a serial killer either kills in the same style as the Ripper or is gifted a similar nickname, from Edgar Lustgarten’s A Case to Answer (1947) to Martina Cole’s Ladykiller (1993), Rippers of one kind or another are everywhere.
Those of primary interest are Colin Wilson’s Ritual in the Dark (1960) and The Killer (1970). Both portray modern-day Jacks in Wilson’s densely-packed prose style and focus on his continuing fascination with the Ripper case. Another title worth tracking down is Fredric Brown’s The Screaming Mimi (1949), where an alcoholic reporter is on the trail of a Ripper in Chicago who is killing off showgirls.