The Five - Hallie Rubenhold

This book bills itself as "The Untold Lives of the Five Women killed by Jack the Ripper", which is not strictly true as the excellent bibliography demonstrates. What it is, however, is the breakthrough book on the subject, and it is done very well indeed. Rubenhold's thesis is that the canonical five victims (not including Martha Tabram) were not 'just prostitutes'. Even the two who were without doubt prostitutes (Stride and Kelly) were not only prostitutes, but women who had substantial lives, children in some cases, and certainly partners. They might be remembered today solely as Ripper victims but they left traces at the time for other reasons as well.

Polly Nicholls and Annie Chapman were both respectable married women before misfortune struck. Drink was Polly's downfall and Chapman lost everything when her husband died. Rubenhold is right to point out that neither was ever arrested for prostitution and both had legitimate ways of making the few pence needed to fund a bed in the doss house. Today they would simply be regarded as legally homeless and we do not automatically assume that middleaged homeless women are necessarily prostitutes. I can assure you that we see a dispiriting number of them in court and prostitution is never assumed and rarely alleged. Rubenhold's secondary theory is that the Ripper was able to dispatch his victims swiftly and silently not because they were stupid enough to solicit his custom but because he searched them out while they slept rough, in yards and dark corners - compelling reasoning in both the Nicholls and Chapman cases.

Liz Stride probably wasn't a Ripper victim and was certainly an occasional prostitute - she had a conviction for it back in Sweden, and about the only thing eyewitnesses seemed to agree upon was that she was touting for trade on the night of the so-called 'Double Event'. Kate Eddowes, the other victim that night, was a traveller, a female tramp, and an epic drinker. When she was turned out of the police station in the small hours she cheerfully announced that she would soon get her doss money. This has long been assumed to refer to prostitution, but again, relying on my personal court acquaintance with many contemporary women in her position, I would favour either petty theft or plain outright begging.

The weak link in Rubenhold's argument is the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly. For a start, that almost certainly wasn't her name - which Rubehold herself points out - and she was definitely a prostitute with no other means of support, who claimed (unreliably at best) to have recently been a much higher class courtesan with experiences of the maisons closes of Paris or perhaps Antwerp. Clearly the Ripper vented every last vestige of rage on Kelly's corpse. The extent of the injuries suggests, in  modern theories of violence on women, personal acquaintance, a relationship betrayed; but since we haven't a clue who Kelly was, and uniquely among the five no one ever came forward to claim her, we cannot follow up on any leads.

A fascinating book - a rare serious addition to the field of Ripperology and highly recommended. I have read dozens and dozens of books on the subject and put in hundreds of hours of personal research, which I will now have to go through again in light of Rubenhold's propositions.

Jack and the Thames Torso Murders - Drew Gray and Andrew Wise

A new Ripper, the subtitle asks? A new suspect, certainly, and a lot of impressive investigation of themes rarely tackled before (the use of rail, trams and buses; the possibility that the killer worked for a firm that had cornered the market in horse butchery and had depots all over London) but for me the fundamental premise - that 'Jack' was responsible for both series of murders in London in 1888 - falls flat. It was the one thing that police and experts agreed on at the time: whoever dumped the torsos was not the same person who slashed up women on the streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. It strikes me, moreover, that their motives were different. For example, the torso killer was not greatly interested in the reproductive system of his victims whereas Jack seems to have been interested in nothing else.

Overall, though, this is a highly commendable addition to the field of Ripperology with a refreshing academic sub-structure. The new suspect is credible for one or the other series (more likely the torso murders), certainly lived locally and died at the right time. The last chapter alone, surveying the growth of the Ripper industry, is worth the price. The annoying thing for me is the selectivity of the sources surveyed. The old Ripper hands who co-operated with them are beyond reproach, many other significant contributors are ignored entirely. Leonard Matters, the first in the field, is dismissed because of 'errors' that are never specified. For me, too much credibility is given to geographic and psychological profiling, techniques which have rather fallen from favour since their heyday in the late 20th century. That said, any theorist really has to opt for a local or an incomer. Gray and Wise, go with the majority nowadays, and go for a local. Once you've done that, geographical profiling is always going to be a strand of your thesis.

There is, ultimately, a lot here that is new. New means of getting from A to B in and around the murder ground are brought to light. Convincing arguments are made in favour of including more victims in both series and I for one won't be satisfied until I have followed these up myself.

If you're interested in the Ripper, you have to read this.

Jack the Ripper- Terry Lynch

I picked up this book as part of an Amazon bundle. I simply couldn't resist. Why had I never heard of it before? Because it is published by Wordsworth in their series 'Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural' and received minimal promotion, most people assuming, no doubt, that it was slasher fiction. Lynch doesn't use the usual publicity device of naming a new suspect so even the tabloids passed it by.

It is, however, an essential read for the dedicated Ripperologist. Lynch is no prose stylist (and I don't suppose he would claim to be); he has been poorly served, if at all, by an editor. Yet he does a strong line in good old-fashioned logic. Rather than structure everything around a theory of who did it, he does a thorough job of reviewing and mostly sidelining the theories of others. The truth is, we don't know who did it and in all probability will never know. For me, Lynch finally demolishes the notion that Elizabeth Stride was a Ripper victim. Once this is out of the way, the time pressure is off for the murder, an hour so later, of Catherine Eddowes. Likewise, Lynch has convinced me that the supposed Ripper letters are all irrelevant nonsense.

He also offers a valuable reminder that the Ripper was not as extraordinary as we often assume. He wasn't the only uncaught London serial killer of 1888, nor the most prolific, nor even the first. Whilst the East End was terrorised by Jack, someone was dumping female torsos in the western reaches of the Thames. The torso killer started in 1887 and was definitely still killing and dissecting in 1889. There is even a theory that he deliberately dumped one torso in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel, in order to put the blame on his knife-wielding rival.

I would not recommend Lynch's book to someone dipping a toe into Ripperology, but I would strongly commend it to anyone who finds themselves convinced by the better written works of Stephen Knight or Tom Cullen. And no one who has read as many Ripper books as I have can consider themselves a completest without it.