The Prince and the Whitechapel Murders - Saul David

I'm a thoroughgoing Ripperphile and therefore could not resist this fictional version.

It's a Zulu Hart novel. That gave me pause. Zulu is actually Major George Hart VC, son of an Irish actress with Zulu blood and the Duke of Cambridge. No, not the current one - this is George, 2nd duke of Cambridge, Field Marshal and cousin of Queen Victoria. As such Zulu George is recalled from Gibraltar and offered two clandestine tasks - the first is to infiltrate the Fenian movement that is terrorising London, the second to keep and eye on the second in line to the throne, Prince Albert Victor, and wean him off his homosexual friends. This is complicated when prostitutes start being 'ripped' in Whitechapel and clues point to the prince's involvement.

The adventure clips along nicely. Young George is a splendid character for an adventure series, brave, honest and just sufficiently conflicted to spice things up. The plot is cleverly worked and gives what is probably a fair portrayal of the young prince - thick as a plank, sexually conflicted, but not a danger to society. I won't say who David puts forward as his murderer but I will reveal that he goes for one of the rarer ploys, which is that the Ripper was a two-man operation. This relies on two of the murders, Liz Stride and Martha Turner, neither of whom are always canonical. But it also reflects a number of more recent serial killer cases in which two men were involved, for example the John Duffy railway murders.

Interesting ideas, entertainingly deployed.

The Third Plantagenet - John Ashdown-Hill

John Ashdown-Hill was the genealogist-historian who tracked down people descended from Richard III's female relatives though not, of course, from Richard himself.  This meant the DNA in the skeleton dug up in the car park of Leicester Social Services could be matched, confirming the remains of the crooked-back man killed in battle, always said in the historical records to have been buried where he was found, was indeed the missing king.

The dig was funded by the Ricardians, of whom Ashdown-Hill is one, who were appalled when the 'Tudor propaganda' deformity was there before their very eyes.  The implication, of course, is that everything else Thomas More said about Richard might also be true, in particular that he murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower - just like every contemporary chronicler, including those who wrote before 1485, said he did.

The Ricardians, quite openly, have an agenda - to restore the king's reputation.  This can lead them into odd yet fascinating digressions, which is what interested me about Ashdown-Hill's latest book.  His thesis is that the Duke of Clarence, the surviving brother between Edward IV and Richard, was not the scheming, self-promoting, untrustworthy blot on the landscape who screams out at us from the pages of history (and I'm talking here to real history; that recorded at the time).  Thus, for Ashdown-Hill every Plantagenet male other than Clarence and Richard was illegitimate and excluded from the crown.  I'm no fan of the British royal family and their endless progeny but I know for a fact some of them were married - I've seen them marry on the telly.

His other problem is that Clarence has left very few traces behind him (though, to be fair, he has an awful lot of actual direct descendants thanks to his daughter Margaret Countess of Salisbury).  Even his bones seem to have vanished from his tomb.  Thus everything has to be reconstructed or hypothesized.  The result is great fun in every sense.  Ashdown-Hill provokes argument, which is what books should do from time to time.  I don't agree with some of his theories (frankly, I don't agree with any of them) but I am confident that what he identifies as facts are indeed reliable.  I enjoyed it, and there are plenty of other modern histories of the period I can't say the same about.