Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [50]
Although he offered occasional unsolicited advice on the Ripper murders, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never put his most famous creation to work in tracking Jack down. However, other authors have been only too keen to send Sherlock Holmes down murky East End streets. At a rough estimate, Holmes and the Ripper have crossed paths on at least twenty occasions. From Anon’s Jack El Destripador to Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), Holmes has deducted and deducted again, but they keep bringing him back to have another go. Ellery Queen teamed up with Sherlock in A Study in Terror (1966). Barry Roberts’ Sherlock Holmes and the Royal Flush (1998) matched Holmes against Dr Tumblety. John Sladek’s Black Aura (1974) suggested Jack was Dr Watson. He wasn’t alone – both Holmes and Conan Doyle have been implicated in other novels. And if Holmes’ solutions aren’t satisfactory then there have always been others to have a go. Mycroft Holmes, Professor Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade, Irene Adler and even Holmes’ ‘sister’, Charlotte, have all had their own Ripper-hunting stories told. In fact, the only character who doesn’t seem to have tracked the Ripper is Mrs Hudson... Now why would that be? Surely not...
Alternative views of the Ripper case have been rarer but often better. Harlan Ellison’s sequel to Robert Bloch’s ‘A Toy for Juliette’, ‘The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World’ (1967) not only offers another suspect for our consideration but throws our voyeurism back in our face as Jack, the eternal outsider, becomes both a sociological experiment and a cheap vicarious thrill for a future society. Ramsey Campbell’s hallucinatory Jack’s Little Friend (1975) proposes a symbiotic relationship that would give David Attenborough nightmares. Patrice Chaplin’s By Flower and Dean Street (1976) has Jack and Elizabeth Stride possess a modern-day couple who meet in the eponymous street. Peter Ackroyd’s atmospheric Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) features a similar run of crimes almost ten years before the Ripper with a disappointingly predictable ending. Jack headed out West in Richard Laymon’s Savage (1993), followed by a young boy. Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) tells, in Sinclair’s queasily elliptical style, of a group of seedy modern-day second-hand booksellers tracking the Ripper in his William Gull identity. Jack rubbed shoulders with the Vampire King in Kim Newman’s splendid Anno Dracula (1992) and again in Roger Zelazny’s experimental A Night in the Lonesome October (1993).
There have been books of poems, several plays and parodies about the Ripper crimes. Jack continues to surface in likely and unlikely places. He has met Doctor Who’s Doctor on at least two occasions: The Pit (1993) by Neil Penswick and Matrix (1998) by Robert Perry and Mike Tucker. In Philip José Farmer’s A Feast Unknown (1969) Lord Grandrith, a character not at all dissimilar to Tarzan, reveals that the Ripper was his father!
Comics
Graphic violence meets graphic art. Jack has sporadically appeared in comics. He has been the subject of one-off EC-style shockers in horror anthology comics such as Asylum, Creepy and The House of Mystery. He has had guest appearances in longer running series such as Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol (issues 23–34, [1989]), Dark Horse comics’ Predator Nemesis (1997 – spin-off from the Schwarzenegger movie) and DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer (the cheerfully seditious ‘Royal Blood’ 1992, issues 52–55). He has pitted his wits against Judge Dredd (‘Night of the Ripper!’) Batman (‘Gotham by Gaslight’, 1989),Wonder Woman (‘Amazonia’) and even the Justice League of America (‘Island of Doctor Moreau’) in the incarnation of an orang-utan (shades of Poe). In the four-part Blood of the Innocents (1986) by Rickey Shanklin, Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel, Jack is Prince Eddy, battling with both syphilis and the recently arrived Count Dracula.
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