Jack the Ripper: CSI: Whitechapel by John Bennett and Paul Begg
| Jack the Ripper: CSI: Whitechapel by John Bennett and Paul Begg | |
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| Category: True Crime | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Several minor flaws don't stop this book from being a successful evocation of the Whitechapel Murders, and the world they happened in then and now. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 224 | Date: October 2012 |
| Publisher: Andre Deutsch | |
| ISBN: 9780233003627 | |
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He was an avenging doctor, he was a foreign madman, he was royalty, he was a she – he was even Sherlock bleeding Holmes. Whoever the actual Jack the Ripper was I doubt will ever be known. What is for sure is that new books that cover the subject with any conviction have to fall into one of two camps – those positing a new suspect, or those presenting the known facts about the crimes and their victims in a new fashion. This book is definitely in the latter category.
It's a book that in the end is pretty successful, but one that opens itself up to many, many little nitpicks. Much is made of the new visual representations of the crime scenes, but the artist doesn't do much to inform when he creates a stygian darkness for all his computer-aided images, nor when he colours several of the early ones in with a lit sign that the text will tell you would have been a few blocks and corners away. The maps for every case come far too late in the book, almost every time. Elsewhere, though, the designers have really turned up trumps, with copious images that sell the book much more successfully – whether it be the contemporary press cuttings, the nightmarish scene-of-crime photos of Mary Jane Kelly, or the valuable look the authors' knowledge provides into how the original East End scenes and neighbourhoods have been altered over the intervening years.
The text is of a similar quality – welcome, but with room for improvement, especially with some proofreading. It opens very authoritatively on the kind of awful slum world the Ripper inhabited, before entering into each and every Whitechapel Murder with great detail – fleshing out the characters, the buildings where they lived and the ways in which they spent their final hours before becoming such unfortunate victims. The minutiae are excellent, although more craft could have served the reader better – with several major coincidences regarding characters living next door to each other, and so on, referrals elsewhere should be by page number not just chapter number, in pages that don't number the chapters anyway. There are several important box-outs, covering side issues in mini-essays, but a couple of times you have to have read them first to get the full gist of the main writing.
And while of course we can write about the fallen women the Ripper slew a lot more decisively than we can about he himself, these chapters work as mini-biographies of the victims yet don't fully give Jack his character. A closing chapter summarising the suspects down the years goes some way to cover that, and as I say the contemporary world does feature, but books such as Frenzy! by Neil Root show that you can create a portrayal of a killer through such things as the press coverage they received.
On the whole, however, the book will fit nicely on to the shelf of both the avid collector and the curious newcomer. Tagging it with a spurious CSI moniker is indicative of how forensically the creators delve into every detail, inching their way through the original reports, with all the victims' histories, witness statements and more, and photo archives of all the scenes between then and now. It does correctly and satisfyingly put you into the world of the murders in an encyclopaedic, and non-melodramatic, fashion. It might remain as unconvincing and as imperfect as any theory to the Ripper's identity, but it is not to be dismissed.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper by James Carnac is dubious yet interesting for those keen on the subject.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Jack the Ripper: CSI: Whitechapel by John Bennett and Paul Begg at Amazon.com.
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