UBC: Andrew Cook, Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper by Andrew Cook

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



For someone who sneers at Ripperologists for bending facts to suit their crazy pet theories, this is a guy with a crazy pet theory and no compunction whatsoever about bending facts. He won't even use one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous quotes correctly:

Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proffered on a number of occasions that the process of elimination was the most effective way to shed light on a conundrum. When you have progressively eliminated, piece by piece, the impossible and the improbable, whatever you have left is likely to lead towards an answer. (Cook 161)

How the quote actually goes is, of course:

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (Doyle, The Sign of the Four, Chapter 6, emphasis in original)

Cook has in fact reversed the meaning: Holmes specifically and emphatically tells Watson that you have to accept the improbable, not eliminate it. This does not suit Cook's argument, since he's claiming it's too improbable that all, or even most, of the Whitechapel victims were killed by the same man (and therefore there's one "psychopath" and an undetermined number of "copy-cat killings" (Cook 199), because apparently the only reason people haven't been going around disembowelling prostitutes left and right is because they hadn't realized they could get away with it until the Ripper showed them how--and that's not improbable in the least). So he paraphrases and misrepresents, "twist[ing] facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts" (Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia"). And this run-in with Sherlock Holmes unfortunately serves as an accurate metonymy for the book as a whole.

Cook uses evidence badly and very selectively, claims things are evidence that aren't, presents as strokes of genius ideas that are common fare in the better class of Jack the Ripper books. He speculates egregiously. His source citations are pretty much useless, and he almost never bothers to cite his secondary sources at all. And he infuriates me by citing Victorian doctors' ideas about "lunatics" as if they have any relation whatsoever to the current understanding of mental illness. (Hint: no.) His authority on psychopathology is a book published in 1941.

But what irks me most about this book is that there's an actual interesting and important idea buried in all the nonsense. Cook argues (almost certainly following someone else, although I don't know who) that the Dear Boss letter and postcard were a hoax perpetrated by the Star in order to boost sales. He even supplies evidence to suggest that the actual writer was a reporter named Frederick Best. He certainly convinces me that the Star's editor, T. P. O'Connor, was exactly the sort of man who would think it was a splendid idea. And, of course, it was the Dear Boss letter that gave Jack the Ripper his name. I even agree that once you've postulated that "Jack the Ripper"--the idea of a single fiend in human form slashing his way through the fallen women of Whitechapel--was the creation of a couple of venal newspaper men, it's reasonable to go on and reassess the evidence of the murders to see what kind of pattern you get. But Cook does this reassessment excruciatingly badly, to the point that even when I agree with him, I reflexively disbelieve him. (I'm absolutely willing to entertain the idea that Elizabeth Stride doesn't belong in the sequence of Ripper murders--except when I'm told to by Andrew Cook.) And what he doesn't do is pay any attention to the genuine and attestable series of copy-cat crimes going on in the fall of 1888: the hoax letters to the police and the newspapers, all purporting to be from Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell is a fascinating book about those letters, and I would love to see more attention paid to them. A book seriously about copy-cat crimes (the psychology and the history and how many actual proven examples there are) and the letters (including the hoax--and were there letters to the police before the Dear Boss letter? I think there were, but I can't remember for sure) and whether you can apply the same idea to the Whitechapel murders would be awesome. This is really not that book.

I'm giving Jack the Ripper one star because there are those pieces of a good book buried in the bad rhetoric and bad argumentation supporting yet another crazy pet theory. But I don't recommend it.



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