Rivals of the Ripper - Jan Bondeson

 It has been a while since I indulged my addiction to Ripperology.  In that time the Swedish researcher Jan Bondeson has staked out a niche in the field for himself.   To begin with, Bondeson is much better qualified as a scientist and researcher than most others.   It might equally be a bonus that he is not British nor even a native speaker of English.   This enables him to cut through some significant swathes of nonsense.

Essentally Bondeson is fascinated by the odd and the extreme.   I am particularly attracted by his The Great Pretenders (2003).   In the meantime I found this, from 2016/   The title is a bit of cheat, really.   None of these murders have anything to do with Jack the Ripper; most of them are nowhere near his period of activity.   Some of the victims are full or part-time prostitutes but it is surely no surprise that sex workers have always been especially vulnerable.

The subtitle is exactly what the book is about: Unsolved murders of women in late Victorian London.   We have murders on trains, in old Euston, and even in a milk shop.   None of the perpetrators were ever caught though Bondeson makes a good case for them have being correctly identified by the police.   Few of the investigations can be criticised, although there is one by the City Police, which overlaps with some aspects of Ripperology, where those in charge were so utterly incompetent that the Square Mile would have been a lot safer had they been locked up.

Otherwise we have murderers who were plainly mad, undermining my pet theory that Victorian asylums were better than our contemporary mental health services.   On the other hand, Bondeson seems to endorse my other theory that mass transportation enabled predatory killers.

What I especially enjoyed about this book was the depth in which Bondeson scrutinises the evidence.   He is especially good at setting the scene, which in itself can be an important clue to what happened.   In one of my research projects I have unearthed the seamy side of Victorian Bloomsbury; Bondeson has done likewise.   I have learned much I didn't know.   I enjoyed the process.   I shall be on the lookout for more Bondeson.

The Bradmoor Murder - Melville Davisson Post

 

You want your murders vintage?  How about this, from 1922, by an American 'master' living in England and obsessed with the English upper class.  The title story is a locked room mystery about ancient curses.  Indeed, all the stories are broadly similar in that they have narrators who have little or nothing to do with the story but who are told what happens by others.  There are elements of the supernatural which recurring characters like Sir Henry Marquis, Head of Scotland Yard's CID, and Sir Godfrey Simon, the world-famous alienist, accept without batting an eye.  Everybody has a peerage or at least a knighthood and the action takes place everywhere from Libya to Belgium.  They are very unusual and quite fascinating.  And there are more of the same available from Bloomsbury Reader. 

The Swag Man - Howard Jacobson

Swag Man is a short memoir/long article published as an Amazon Kindle Single by the Tablet Magazine (a new read on Jewish life).

The Swag Man in question, we assume, is Howard's father Max, a huckster on the Manchester markets, always on the verge of making millions or going bankrupt, but never quite managing either.  Howard, of course, was dragged into service for Max's routines, and had no aptitude for it whatsoever.  But the true hero, the Swag Man made spectacularly good, is Frank Cohen, apprentice to Max, hero to Howard, DIY entrepreneur, collector of YBAs and co-founder, in April 2013, of the free to enter Dairy Art Centre in Bloomsbury.

What Jacobson gives us, in under fifty pages, is a snapshot on Jewish advancement in Manchester in the second half of the twentieth century, the last time someone could rise from the street markets to a Cheshire mansion, or in the author's case, the Booker Prize and sub Stephen Fry national treasuredom.  Two decades of Blair and Cameron and that awful prune Clegg have put a thorough-going stop to social mobility.