切り裂きジャックの真相

by Bruce Paley

Tankobon Hardcover

About the author

My grandparents came from Ukraine and Belarus. I was born in Manhattan, after which my family moved to Queens, where I grew up, and I currently live in the UK. I am the author of the books Jack the Ripper: The Simple Truth (Headline, UK) regarded by many as the best book on that crowded subject, and Giraffes in my Hair (Fantagraphics, USA), a graphic novel written in collaboration with my partner, the cartoonist Carol Swain. I have also contributed to various music journals both in the US and the UK. I am currently seeking a publisher/agent for two books I completed during lockdown: That Evil Life is set in the downtown New York punk music and drug scene of the late 1970s, when I worked as a music journalist for the Soho Weekly News. The novel follows the ups and downs of two functioning heroin addicts and their circle of friends who exist in a self-contained bubble in lower Manhattan, where the concerns and realities of the world at large do not penetrate their daily lives; it features a character based on Johnny Thunders, who was a friend of mine. The other book, The Obrovský Theatre Co. of Blaznivyzeme, is a political satire/black comedy that deals with the exploits of a troupe of dwarfs as they try to mount a production of Hamlet. (It is also the perfect vehicle for Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) only he doesn’t know it yet!). Over the years my jobs have included stints as a hot dog vendor at Shea Stadium (where I saw but could not hear The Beatles); a horse wrangler at a dude ranch; a New York cabbie; a comic shop owner, and a private detective, among others. As a boy, I used to deliver Greta Garbo’s groceries. In 1968 I ran away with my girlfriend, with Jimi Hendrix’s personal blessing. A friend of a well-known guitarist once OD’d in my New York apartment and got me evicted. I was at the infamous 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention in Chicago, where I crashed with armed Black militants; I was also at Woodstock, tripping on LSD for The Who. A few years later I got caught up in a coup d’etat in Morocco, and in 1995, I was arrested in Tangier for trying to smuggle my Czech girlfriend into the country. Once I had to help the inebriated Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds onto a train. I also once stole an Egyptian artefact from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, only to smuggle it back in after I became convinced it was cursed!Bruce entered the world in 1949, at Beth Israel Hospital in lower Manhattan. His father was a first generation Jewish American of Russian stock, who married a woman of Polish extraction and opened a candy store in midtown Manhattan. One memory of that time involves an "old" woman who used to stop by the store for cigarettes, after which Bruce would carry her groceries to her apartment around the corner, where she would give him a quarter tip. One day Bruce's father told him that the woman was a famous actress. Her name? Greta Garbo.
Tragedy entered Bruce's life when he was not yet three years old, when his mother died suddenly of a brain tumour. Only a year later his father remarried and the family moved briefly to the South Bronx, and then to Whitestone, Queens. Like most kinds of the time, Bruce had a Davy Crockett hat, collected baseball cards, and played sandlot baseball and football. But Bruce's stepmother never accepted him, and he grew into a rebellious teenager, eventually running off to California in 1968 with his girlfriend in those carefree hippie times when you could stick out your thumb and travel several thousand miles across America on a whim, communing with countless likeminded souls along the way. It was upon returning to New York after several months on the road that a friend gave Bruce a copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, which triggered his interest in the works of Kerouac and the Beat writers, and inspired Bruce to want to become a writer; he even once read a poem of his to Allen Ginsberg! But as the sunshine of the '60s gave way to the clouds of the '70s,