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.

A Case of Spirits - Peter Lovesey

 I remember when Sergeant Cribb first graced our TV screens in the mid 1970s.  We'd been introduced to Victorian detectives by The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes but this was something different - a newly written Victorian detective in a wholly credible Victorian world but written by a young man fully conscious of contemporary sensibilities.  And written, moreover, with wit.

Lovesey's specialism was the Victorian fad - competitive walking or 'wobbling', waxworks and the chamber of horrors, fear of dynamiters, and in this instance Parapsychology.  He offers a fictional body, the Life After Death Society (LADS) but the members are highly reminiscent of the real-life Society for Psychical Research.  The mediums are all frauds and at heart everyone knows it.  But then one is murdered in the house of a prominent medical man in the presence of both Cribb and Inspector Jowett.

It's all great fun.  The Cribb books are all classics and should be much higher profile than they are.  After he ceased writing them Lovesey wrote two other novels which I enjoyed, The False Inspector Dew and Keystone, but I'm afraid I never took to his other long-running series featuring Peter Diamond.  I might however try his Prince of Wales series and the novels he wrote as Peter Lear sound interesting.

A Bid for Fortune - Guy Boothby

 A Bid for Fortune (1895) is the debut of the Victorian super-villain Dr Nikola, a man with worldwide interests, limitless resources and a spooky cat called Apollyon.

"Ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porter in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Tibet, the Spanish priests in Manila or the Sultans of Borneo, the Ministers of Siam, or the French in Saigon.  They'll all know Dr Nikola and his cat, and take my word for it, they fear him."

The premise is silly - a holy relic of the Himalayan Masters promising access to the Mysteries of the Ancients.  it is of its time, the fin de siecle with its occult interests.  In physical appearance Nikola is the personification of the aesthetic decadent.  Boothby was an Australian living in London who produced more than 50 novels and yet was only 38 when he died.  Dr Nikola is perhaps his most enduring character, an obvious forerunner of Ian Fleming's Dr No.  Boothby was prolific but skillful.  His narrative never falters but the plot twists are all properly planned and his characters fully rounded.  He had travelled the world and it shows.  The locations here, of which there are many, smack of authenticity and personal knowledge.

There are four further Nikola novels and I hope to read them all. 

The Dorrington Deed-Box - Arthur Morrison

 Arthur Morrison (1863-1945) was a very successful chronicler of London low-life.  His masterpiece was probably A Child of the Jago, a wonderful book.  In the 1970s he was rediscovered thanks to Hugh Greene's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.  This, from 1897, is one of the many variants Morrison conjured up in 'rivalry' of Conan Doyle.

Horace Dorrington, of Dorrington and Hicks, in Bedford Street, Covent Garden.  Dorrington is an inquiry agent in the same way that Holmes was a consulting detective.  He is also, in the tradition of Jonathan Wild, a conman and a crook.  Morrison has devised an ingenious way of disguising the fact that these were doubtless originally published as separate short stories in various periodicals.  He begins with 'The Narrative of Mr James Rigby' in which a young Australian discovers the duplicity of Dorrington after escaping a fiendish death trap.  He also discovers the titular deed box from which he reconstructs other crimes and cases, the first of which, 'The Case of Janisssary,' tells how Dorrington came into possession of the death trap and the couple who operate it.

For fans of the genre the collection is many-layered.  James Rigby is almost certainly Australian in homage to Guy Boothby (1867-1905), an Australian come to London, who created Doctor Nikola, a super-criminal who in his day rivalled and even outstripped Holmes's arch-enemy Moriarty.  In 'The Case of Mr Loftus Deacon the victim is an avid collector of oriental art, as was Morrison.

Thoroughly enjoyable and highly recommended.

The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

What we have here is a collaboration between two founding fathers of cyberpunk, an alternate history in which Babbage's proto-computer has changed the world, notably Britain. The Tories under the Duke of Wellington tried to hold off the Radicals until Wellington was assassinated and the Rads took over. Byron is Prime Minister, his daughter Ada is effectively First Lady, and the House of Lords has become an appointed senate of savants. Steam carriages prowl the streets and the greatest, most popular form of communication is by way of punched cards. Vast bodies of data are stored and minutely analysed. The Victorians of 1855-56 even have their own version of fake news - eye-catching headlines on big screens with no real fact or analysis behind them. Which is pretty damn impressive for a book published in 1991.


It fascinated me. I loved the game of style played by the authors in which we have a series of five more or less standalone 'iterations' and conclude with a 'modus' of pseudo documents. We have a series of protagonists who come and go, some taking up more space than others. We have the Rad prostitute Sybil Gerard, who becomes involved with the speaking tour of ousted 'Texian' president Sam Houston; then there is Edward Mallory, discoverer of the Wisconsin Brontosaurus. He falls in with Laurence Oliphant, a sort of effete James Bond with connections in the very highest circles in Britain, the US and, for some reason, Japan.


These are fascinating characters. The world they inhabit is vividly realised down to the tiniest detail. The warnings to the modern reader are manifold. The problem is, though, I haven't the faintest idea what the book was about. What is its theme? What exactly are our heroes trying to achieve? And what do they actually achieve?


I'm not at all sure these things actually matter. They didn't in any way spoil my enjoyment. I suppose in a way there's a similarity to Murakami's 1Q84. Essentially, this is the world I have created for you; this is what these people do in it; make of that what you will.

The Blackest Streets - Sarah Wise

This is a deeply-researched, unflinching account of the Old Nichol slum in late Victorian Shoreditch.  It has been put together with academic precision but what makes it such a captivating read is that Wise is not shy about saying what she thinks of the slumlords and their elected representatives.  In the case of the Old Nichol they are largely one and the same.  Local government in London at that time was in the hands of the vestry, forerunner of today's parish councils.  Like the parish councils they were expensive, ineffective, self-serving and hypocritical.  The Nichol Vestrymen owned the very slums they pontificated about and when they were forcibly stood down after three years' service, joined the Board of Guardians in order to deny relief to their tenants until they were free to resume their vestry seats.

The ownership of the Nichol properties is Wise's best work here.  Other notable blots on the social landscape included the pointless third duke of Chandos, and Sir "Tommy" Colebrooke, so-called lord of the manor of Stepney, gawd 'elp us.  Vermin both.  She also offers an illuminating insight into Arthur Morrison's classic, A Child of the Jago, which is set in a thinly-disguised Nichol.

Sarah Wise is building an important career writing about the social injustices of the capital of the empire on which the sun never set.  Her first book, The Italian Boy, was about the horrors of the workhouse and her latest, Inconvenient People, concerns the Lunacy trade in Victorian London, a subject I have researched to a certain extent myself.  I can't wait to read her findings.