Edmund Reid

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Gideon Smith & The Mask of the Ripper David Barnett London: Snowbooks (2015) ISBN-978-1-9096-79559 Paperback 379pp £8.99 London, 1890. For more than two years a monster called Jack the Ripper has been preying on prostitutes in the End East, sawing open their skulls and removing handfuls of brain tissue. The police have run out of ideas. The unfortunates have gone on strike. The country is on the brink of riot and civil disobedience. It’s time to call in Gideon Smith, the dashing young penny dreadful adventurer and pulp superhero of the Empire. But things don’t quite go to plan when a despicable villain – Markus Mesmer - steals Gideon’s memory, leaving him to wander forlorn and adrift around the dangerous streets of Whitechapel. Who will catch the Ripper now? Who will save the Crown? This is the third instalment in David Barnett’s energetic, rip roaring steampunk adventure series set in an alternative British Empire where the American Revolution never took place and where airships traverse the skies piloted by cyborgs. The novel is chock-a-block with steampunk motifs - brass dragons, dinosaurs in the sewers, hydraulic police truncheons, clockwork bloodhounds, and best of all, Maria the Mechanical Girl with a body made of coils, gears, pistons and cogs but the emotions of a woman. Add Jack the Ripper to the stew, and you have a colourful, action-packed drama, variously decadent and swashbuckling, blood-curdling and goofy, full of weird and wonderful and abominable characters. Hugely enjoyable. The Night in Question Laurie Graham Quercus (2015) ISBN-978-1-78206-9751 Paperback 368pp £13.99 Heard the one about Jack the Ripper and the female comic from the Black Country? Laurie Graham’s magnificent new novel is set in the world of East London variety theatre at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. It tells the story of Dot Allbones, who has risen from humble beginnings in Wolverhampton to become the darling of music hall audiences, a lioness comique playing venues in Hoxton and Mile End. But Dot is getting on a bit and struggling to keep her top billing as theatre-goers clamour for younger artistes and new speciality acts. One evening, outside the Griffin Hall in Shoreditch, she meets up with a childhood friend she hasn’t seen in over twenty years - Kate Eddowes, now fallen on hard times and eking out a piteous existence on the streets of Whitechapel. At the same time, a peculiar American herbalist enters Dot’s life - a Dr Frank Townsend, who may be a Fenian terrorist, or a pervert. Or something far worse… It’s the autumn of 1888 and Jack the Ripper is about to begin his murder spree. Readers of this journal will have a fairly good idea where the story is heading, and if this dark, elegantly written, funny novel has a minor fault it is only that there are so few surprises plot-wise. Even so, it is Laurie Graham’s probing of the underside of East End Victorian life - the doss houses, the cellar kitchens, the despair and the squalor - that gives her novel real depth and substance. It sparkles with a touching, heartfelt portrait of Kate Eddowes, depicted not as a mutilated cadaver but as a warm, living human being with memories and hopes for the future. Dot Allbones is a strong female character with an engaging voice full of acid wit and melancholy observation, and she makes a perceptive commentator on the growing public hysteria surrounding the murders. One of her admirers is the journalist Tom Bullen, who provides her - and us - with extra inside information on the atrocities. The fellowship of backstage music hall life is thrillingly evoked. Readers will enjoy the front row seat and marvel at the antics of Randolph the Cycling Trumpeter, Dickie Dabney and his Mathematical Crows, the Infant Prodigy, and Valentine the male soprano. Yet beneath the greasepaint and behind the stage scenery lies a whole universe of pain and sorrow, rivalry and thwarted ambition, lust and secret desire. The Night in Question is a deeply moving novel about men and women, about the power of female friendship, and the way chance and ill-fortune can intercede in life. It’s an absolutely exceptional novel, worldly and passionate, and my favourite work of fiction in 2015. Ripperologist 147 December 2015 70
Proper Red Stuff: Ripper Fiction Before 1900 In this series we take a look at forgotten writers from the 1880s and 1890s who tackled the Jack the Ripper theme in their novels and short fiction. No 2: Fred W Rose: I Will Repay (1892) Frederick W Rose (1849-1915) was born in Paddington, the second son of a Highland army officer. He entered the Civil Service at the age of eighteen and remained there till his retirement more than forty years later. So far as we know he enjoyed a happy and busy career, full of diverting civic incident. For most of his adult life he lived at No. 4 Cromwell Crescent in South Kensington. In 1870 he married Catharine Gilchrist, also of Scottish descent, but filed for divorce in 1891, citing his wife’s adultery. He fathered three sons. Rose was a great European traveller and an accomplished artist and illustrator. His hugely influential political cartoon maps are still very popular today. He also had a life-long interest in murder and true crime, becoming an early member of Our Society (later the Crimes Club). When he was forty-three, Frederick Rose published his second novel, I Will Repay (Eden, Remington & Co, 1892). Set in Pimlico, it’s a grim, rather horrific tale based on the Jack the Ripper murders. It advances the theory that the killer was an epileptic suffering from religious mania who believes he has received instruction from the Almighty to punish prostitutes. The novel contains a fair amount of autobiographical detail in its descriptions of middle class and bohemian party life, but it is the darker material that really impresses. Early on, we watch as the antagonist Wargrave Leinster learns to savour the culling and gralloching of deer on the moorland estates around Perth. An old Spanish bull-fighter teaches him the art of severing the buck’s spinal cord with a single slice of the knife. Later, there are several spectacularly grisly scenes where Leinster dismembers his first female victim using his father’s surgical implements, disposing of the torso and body parts in Epping Forest, Woking, and stations along the suburban East London line. There are episodes, too, verging on necrophily, where Leinster drools over the contents of his large carved oak chest wherein are stored the dead bodies of his victims. One wonders where the author’s venom came from to produce all of this, and it is tantalising to reflect that at the time Rose was writing I Will Repay he was embroiled in an ugly divorce and a bitter public dispute over the custody of his children. I Will Repay is certainly a macabre affair, but it has great merit and significance as perhaps the first serious fictional attempt to understand the psychopathology of the Whitechapel serial killer: by presenting a credible scientific rationale for the Ripper crimes, Rose’s novel stands apart from the shilling shockers and supernatural thrillers that typified most Ripper fiction in the first quarter of a century after the murders. Not unexpectedly, his novel provoked controversy. A reviewer for the Manchester Courier complained that ‘The public does not wish to know about these ghastly horrors, and will decline to go back to the atrocities of the Whitechapel murders, even when presented under the thin disguise of ‘Pimlico’ as the locality.’ The Freeman’s Journal regretted that the author’s obvious literary talent had been wasted on such a ‘gruesome and somewhat undesirable subject’, while The Yorkshire Post dismissed it as an ‘unpleasant novel of which little or nothing can be said in praise.’ Possibly Rose was stung by these hostile reactions, for he gave up fiction writing altogether. Yet it seems likely to me that Rose will have returned to his speculations on epilepsy and murder twelve years later, when he and his fellow enthusiasts at the Crimes Club met over lunch and drinks to debate celebrated murder mysteries such as the Jack the Ripper case. References: For details of Rose’s membership of Our Society, see Arthur Lambton’s article ‘The Crimes Club’ in the London Magazine for March 1923. Rose’s contribution to map-making is briefly covered in Gillian Hill’s Cartographical Curiosities (British Library Publishing, 1978, pp. 46-49). For contemporary reviews of Rose’s novel see ‘Manchester Courier’, January 9, 1892; Freeman’s Journal, January 23, 1892; and The Yorkshire Post, January 27, 1892. A biography of Rose has been announced by Rod Barron, the antiquarian map dealer. There is a copy of I Will Repay in the British Library (shelf mark lsidyv3aed10a0). IN THE NEXT ISSUE we take a look at the new three-part English language translation of Philippe R Welté’s novel Jack the Ripper: The Secret of Mary Jane K., which was a best seller when released in France in 2006. Plus all the latest Ripper fiction. DAVID GREEN lives in Hampshire, England, where he works as a freelance book indexer. He is currently writing (very slowly) a book about the murder of schoolboy Percy Searle in Hampshire in 1888. Ripperologist 147 December 2015 71
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No. 147 December 2015 Edmund Reid N
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The Anniversary Waltz EDITORIAL by
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So you never obtained a description
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poor mutilated woman turned his bra
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As in other interviews given by Rei
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Edmund Reid at Hampton-on-Sea makin
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This sounds similar to Yuri Gagarin
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just touched to guide-rope expected
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Sir Charles Warren Over the years,
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The register also tells us how much
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