5 comments about Jack the Ripper: The Final Chapter.

1. Not being a Ripper enthusiast, I had a very hard time plowing through this book. There's evidently a lot of good research behind it, but it's hidden beneath the taunting of the Diary doubters. The whole tone seems to be to whip up the folks who already agree with him. Folks who believe the Diary is a hoax won't be persuaded by this book, and people like me who have no prior knowledge of the controversy aren't likely to be convinced by Feldman's ranting.



2. Feldman's hypothesis is convincing and well-written. Kudos to Feldman, a non-author and not a "Ripperologist" for being able to piece together all the pieces of this complex story. An all-around great book.



3. This book is utterly frustrating to read. The author is stunningly untalented; the raw material he works with is fascinating, yet he manages to make it all seem banal, pedantic and trite, as well as incomprehensible. He totally lacks any type of story telling ability. For example, Feldman devotes PAGES and PAGES and PAGES to tracking down a confusingly-named line of illegimate descendents of his Ripper suspect, James Maybrick. He includes long details of interviews with these folks and even puts numerous photos of them in the photo section of the book. Yet, it turns out that these descendants of Maybrick have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH the real story, which is the finding of a controversial diary and a watch by yet ANOTHER line of Maybrick illegimate descendants. At another point, Feldman has assembled various legitimate and illegitimate descendants of Maybrick in the drawing room of the house where Maybrick died. Does he tell us the outcome of this Agatha Christie-style assemblage of characters? No, he mentions it in passing, then moves on to yet another section of mind-numbing geneological details. I don't recommend this book, but if you do buy it, skip the narrative (if it could be called that) and go straight to the "cast of characters" guide at the end. This is the most interesting and comprehensible portion of the entire book.



4. In order to save readers from spending money on this shoddily written novel (yes, novel, since it's completely fictional), I will repeat what I said about the forgery ("the diary") itself, since this book is essentially one expanded comment section of the original Maybrick hoax.

   In 1992 a junk dealer from London, Michael Barrett, presented what would become known as "the Maybrick diary", attempting to ping the guilt of being Jack the Ripper on James Maybrick. The "diary" became a media event, and people interested in making money and gain of it have attempted to "prove" its "authenticity"; needless to say, they were unable to, for one simple reason - it is a crude forgery, which was in fact quickly and shoddily updated as new Ripper facts came to light (e.g. when it was revealed that Mary Kelly's heart was missing,
   the forger was in process of creating the "diary" - and he quickly added an awkward note "No heart, no heart..." to the "Kelly section", but forgot to use the same ink to write it!)

   It would take too much space to list literally hundreds of errors and inconsistencies in the "diary", as well as dozens of proofs for its inauthenticity. Instead, a good summary is simply the fact that on 5 January 1995, Barrett admitted to the forgery. To quote his sworn affidavit: "Since December 1993 I have been trying, through the press, the Publishers, the Author of the Book, Mrs Harrison, and my Agent Doreen Montgomery to expose the fraud of ' The Diary of Jack the Ripper ' ("the diary") (...) The facts of this matter are outlined as follows: I Michael Barrett was the author of the original diary of 'Jack the Ripper' and my wife, Anne Barrett, hand wrote it from my typed notes and on occasions at my dictation, the details of which I will explain in due course. The idea of the Diary came from discussion between Tony Devereux, Anne Barrett my wife and myself, there came I time when I believed such a hoax was a distinct possibility. We looked closely at the background of James Maybrick and I read everything to do with the Jack the Ripper matter. I felt Maybrick was an ideal candidate for Jack the Ripper. Most important of all, he could not defend himself. He was not 'Jack the Ripper' of that I am certain, but, times, places, visits to London and all that fitted. It was too easy. I told my wife Anne Barrett, I said, "Anne I'll write a best seller here, we can't fail". Once I realised we could do it. We had to find the necessary materials, paper, pens and ink. I gave this serious consideration. Roughly round about January, February 1990 Anne Barrett and I finally decided to go ahead and write the Diary of Jack the Ripper. In fact Anne purchased a Diary, a red leather backed Diary for L25.00p, she made the purchase through a firm in the 1986 Writters Year Book (...) Sworn at Liverpool in the County of Merseyside, this 5th day of January 1995"

   Stay away from this crude forgery and don't support people who try to peddle it as "the real thing". The same kind of people would try to sell you "splinters from Christ's cross" in the Middle Ages...




5. I first read Shirley Harrisons 'The Diary of Jack the Ripper' in 1993 and was completely intrigued. Here for the first time was something concrete against someone thought to have been the Whitechapel murderer. Evidence that seemed to be more than circumstantial and to my utter surprise everyone seemed to revolt against the very idea. Instead of reading what the book had to tell with an open mind, people automatically claimed it to be a hoax, bashing everything the author implied. Then recently I read the 1998 updated version of the same book, which included new evidence and more information that had come to light during further investigations.
   
   Then I bought and read this book by Paul Feldman. Its been the most expensive Ripper investigation to date. Many years, money and effort has gone into proving the provenance of the diary as well as the watch. And I say provenance because thats what the author is trying to prove ... the origins of the diary as well as the watch ... where it came from ... who had it and how it could possibly have been passed down the family tree. Still today no one has conclusively been able to prove that the diary or the watch is fake. People jumped on the band wagon when Michael Barrett 'confessed' to having supposedly forged the diary. Anyone with half a brain have since realised (as the author did) that this could not possibly have been true. All the evidence he gave to support his 'confession' was immediately and unequivocally disproved. And as I have read some of the reviews posted, many have not read the book properly, because if you had you would soon realise that Barrett does not possess the skill to have produced that document.
   
   Although Paul Feldmans writing style is not the best around, this book makes it hard not to become a believer ... or at least someone who is willing to consider the possibility that the diary (and perhaps even the watch) is not a fake ... and that James Maybrick may well have been the Whitechapel killer.
   
   Why people are so vehemently against the idea that Maybrick could have been The Ripper I dont know. It seems strange that many would rather accuse men with a lot less evidence stacked against them, than seriously consider a man who could clearly have been guilty. Perhaps its a matter of egos ... who knows?
   
   This book, to me, was well worth the read. I was highly impressed with all aspects of the author and his teams investigations. I also appreciated the fact that questions raised by the diarys detractors were all answered in a concise and logical manner. This investigation was no cover up.
   
   Well worth a read!

No comments about When London Walked in Terror.

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3 comments about The Magic Lands.

1. One might look at The Magic Lands and find the title a little generic, and the summary may be a little cliche, but if you were to pick it up you'll see that it is full of suprises. The story is quite a roller coaster and the plot can become utterly unpredictable. I should also mention, that this isn't little red riding hood. The story is dark, bringing up memories of another dark fantasy, Pan's Labrynth. Like Pan's Labrynth,and any good fable, there is an underlying message behind it all and it is a message definitely worth hearing.



2. This is an excellent debut, with some surprisingly evocative passages. Will look forward to seeing more from this promising author!



3. I very much enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone. It is very imaginative and thought provoking, I would love to see more from this author.

5 comments about Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend.

1. As another reviewer has already pointed out, when an excerpt of this book appeared in Harper's Magazine, Francis Heaney and Guy Jacobson wrote a letter to the editor in which they came up with an anagram for the first paragraph of Wallace's excerpt that was far "superior" to any of the anagrams that Wallace had found in Lewis Carroll's work!

   Since part of that review seems to have been cut off, I will repeat this wonderful anagram here. The original text was: "This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland."

   The anagram by Heaney and Jacobson reads: "The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too."

   It seemed so implausible to me that they could come up with such a perfect anagram that I actually checked on the computer to verify that it is an exact anagram! I think that this anagram shows (better than a thousand arguments about how easy it is to anagram fairly large passages!) that Wallace's thesis is bunk. Or else we must put Wallace at the top of our suspect list for Nicole Brown's murder!




2. Anyone who still believes that there is some credence to the anagram idea, should simply go to google, type in "anagram generator" and choose one of the finds, and type in some sentence. You will get absolutely swamped by the output. Try it, see for yourself.



3. First off, this book doesn't prove that Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. It doesn't even come close. What it does do is show how a fertile imagination can take a few facts and run wild with them: it's speculative nonfiction at its finest, or more accurately, speculative non-narrative fiction. I'd be disappointed to discover that Wallace believes in his lunatic thesis, but I wasn't at all disappointed to read it. It's berserk and methodical at the same time, a shining gem of surreality.



4. James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. He was, that's all.
   
   The contents of the Maybrick/Ripper Diary, which display extraordinary in-depth knowledge of both "May" and "Jack", not readily available to the public, as well as a number of other historical factors which blend in perfectly with the story unfolded by the Diary allow for no other reasonable conclusion. James Maybrick WAS Jack the Ripper.
   
   The Ripperology establishment and its groupies, however, continue to disdain the obvious, ever conducting an ostrich-like search for the "real" Ripper and looking for the "forger" of the Diary under every bed.
   
   It's reminiscent of the way that shaggy leftist JFK conspiracy theorists stick their heads into black holes of grassy-knoll fantasia while lying to themselves and to the public in order to exonerate fellow leftist Lee Harvey Oswald and pin the assassination on the Right.
   
   Nevertheless, Richard Wallace's book purporting to show or suggest that the Whitechapel killer was actually children's and fantasy author, Lewis Carroll, is more scholarly than given credit for.
   
   Wallace himself declares an interest in the Maybrick/Ripper diary, as have other psycho-analysts, noting that the diary seems to be "sincere and well-done". But he allows conventional Ripperology to direct his attention from the diary - which is a little like using Saudi intelligence to find Osama bin Laden. Wallace is also misdirected by his own interest in Carroll, of course.
   
   But contrary to what he has been charged with, Wallace isn't just playing word games. Before writing this book, he wrote a different one, based on his training as a therapist, in which he describes a dark side of Lewis Carroll's persona observable behind the upbeat fantasy of his works, and the conclusions that he draws in this book are at least as much based on his therapist training as on his analysis of Ripper letters and Carroll works.
   
   Wallace remarks in this book that at some point, he wondered if he had fully plummeted the uncharted depths of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in his first book.
   
   All right, Wallace DOES go awry. He wonders if Carroll, who lived near London at the time of the Ripper murders found a vent for the suppressed rage that Wallace observes in Carroll's works, in the slaughter of Whitechapel prostitutes. And if the terrible secret that he was holding might ITSELF need an outlet which might be encoded somewhere.
   
   Carroll was a lover of anagrams - might he have hidden clues as to the Ripper's identity in any Ripper correspondence or Carroll work? Wallace "anagrammatizes" these writings, and sure enough...
   
   But as other critics have noted, the English language with 26 letters, flexible syntax, and assortment of homonyms is very malleable, and this sort of deciphering can be misused, however inadvertently. Wallace even suggests that the introduction "Dear Boss" (from the famous "Dear Boss" letters) can be anagrammatized into "sob dears" or "dare boss" ("Dares was another Dodgson nom de plume) or "sores bad" (an associate of Carroll's was afflicted with gout).
   
   But how does one normally start a letter WITHOUT the word "dear"? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
   
   Moreover, just suppose that Carroll had desired to create a work of fancy of 50 words or more and had desperately intended to write it in such a way that the letters couldn't be possibly be rearranged to indicate some unintended secret meaning. How would he have gone about it? Clearly, it wouldn't have been possible, and therein lies the rub.
   
   Anyway, if Carroll NEEDED a confessional outlet for Ripper crimes, he could have included a non-encoded straightforward confession of them in his OWN diaries, to be released to posterity after his death, but as Wallace acknowledges, Carroll's own diaries contain no such thing.
   
   No, Wallace's anagrammatic analyses can be disregarded, but he does come up with other interesting nuggets. The "Eight Little Whores" poem, originally introduced by Donald McCormick and hinted at in the Maybrick Diary, really does have a meter similar to Carroll's "A Game of Fives", written in 1883.
   
   Assuming that the meter isn't a familiar or well-used one, does this similarity really mean that Carroll was the Ripper or does it just mean that Maybrick - I mean the Ripper - read Carroll's poem?
   
   Wallace also has an interesting idea on just where the Whitechapel killer might have gotten the pedigree for the nickname of "Jack" and even a possible pedigree for the modus operandi of the Ripper murders themselves.
   
   Intelligent Maybrickians should assume the air of chess players already comfortably in the middle game of a "Hunt the Ripper" match while shrill critics scream over the dimensions of the game board. Maybrickians should act with an eye toward history and toward a more receptive future generation of Ripper historians. Wallace might have identified some lines of inquiry that will facilitate this.
   
   Finally, Wallace might deserve some commendation for acknowledging the sustaining presence of God in his life while immersing himself in the exploration of the darkest side of the human condition. By allowing light to flood his mind and soul, Wallace likely ensures that he himself will never become part of the Ripperology establishment.



5. This is trying to be a great book, and it does manage to be good. It is in fact very informative, interesting, and intriguing. It has many new views, questions, answers,and insights that I would never have thought about. It is wierd, it is creepy, it is fun, it is all the things you need to begin a great conversation with someone who thinks they know the Ripper tales. Good read. 3 ***

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