GEORGE HUTCHINSON

with a valuable bibliography of Lowndes’s published books. All of this stimulates interest in the figure of Lowndes herself and
whets the appetite for the author’s forthcoming (although temporarily on-hold) full-length biography.
Of course, The Lodger is fairly tame by today’s standards - there are no mutilated corpses, no missing internal organs, no
‘unfortunates’ walking the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. In Lowndes’s reconfiguration of the Ripper story, the killer
targets women who drink alcohol in public, and his homicidal mania is driven by the patriarchal authority of Old Testament
teachings which denounce immodesty and intemperance in women. But read late at night, The Lodger still has the power to
chill. It is a novel that deals primarily in suspicion and dread and unease.
Perhaps like me, you‘ll welcome the opportunity to chuck out the old dog-eared paperback and replace it with this deluxe
new volume from Cambridge Scholars. Editor Elyssa Warkentin has done a great job in re-introducing this early twentiethcentury
classic to scholarly and general public attention.
A Conversation with Maxim Jakubowski
Maxim Jakubowski is a writer and editor of crime, mystery, and erotic fiction.
He has been a columnist for Time Out and the Guardian, and for many years
he owned and ran the Murder One Bookshop on the Charing Cross Road. He
has been called by The Times “the King of the erotic thriller.” He maintains a
website at maximjakubowski.co.uk. His latest collection is The Mammoth Book
of Jack the Ripper Stories published by Robinson on 12 November. Interview
conducted by email between 4-5 October, 2015.
Can you tell us what the story is behind The Mammoth Book of Jack the
Ripper Stories? Did you approach the publishers with the idea, or did they
come to you?
As I used to do yearly, I came up with a series of ideas for possible new
Mammoth fiction collections and this was one of them. It made sense in view of
the success of the non fiction volume I’d done with Nathan Braund some years
earlier and also connected with the Moriarty volume we’d already agreed on.
Jack the Ripper has featured in possibly hundreds of novels, and in countless works of shorter fiction. What is it, do you
think, that writers find particularly alluring about the Ripper and his crimes?
The fact that the crimes have become iconic and that the identity of the perpetrator has never truly been established, thus
reinforcing the mystery and the fascination. It’s become a cultural trope and therefore a challenge for writers to come up with
a worthwhile variation on the theme.
Mammoth Stories was an open-submission anthology. Surely you must have been inundated with tales? How do you cope
with an avalanche of submissions, and what techniques have you developed over the years to quickly winnow out the
gems from the dross?
I treated this anthology as I do all projects (I’ve now done well over a hundred collections in my editing career). I reached
out to 20 or so writers who I knew might respond to the theme or who I admired and felt were in tune with it. Half of those
submitted but through an extensive call for submissions to authors in a variety of genres, I also hoped to see material from not
just crime authors but also people in the horror, SF and even erotica genres. Yes, there was an avalanche of material submitted
but that’s normally the case with all my projects. Once the submission deadline passes, I then take a week and exclusively read
submissions over a short period so I get a feel for the balance of moods and themes, and then, painfully, make my selection.
As ever, more than half the stories from unknown quantities didn’t pass the customary opening page test but then it’s a slow
process to winnow things down, bearing in mind not to allow too many repetitions of culprits, angles and such (although I had
asked potential contributors to warn me in advance of their respective approach). I’m an editor; that’s what I do, Ripper or
not related.
If I asked you what makes a good Jack the Ripper story, what would you say?
That it should be well written and surprise me.
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 96