Writing Portfolio

19.3.20

Recent reads - Jack the Ripper (again), Britain in the early Seventies and a Biblical travelogue (of sorts)


I’ll start this post, about three factual works that I have recently read, by saying that I really should stop reading books about Jack the Ripper. It’s not exactly a healthy subject to obsess about. After the latest Ripper book, I think I’m done on that subject for now. It was Jack the Ripper: The 21st Century Investigation by Trevor Marriott, an ex-copper who was bigged up by the blurb as a ‘top Murder Squad detective’ who ‘reveals the Ripper’s true identity at last’; that last bit is used, with slight variations, for the blurb on almost all books about the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 so I didn’t exactly have high hopes. There followed a re-hash of the murders (I really am not sure if there’s much new that can be said here, but every Ripper murder book must of course cover this very well-trod ground – although to his credit, Marriott does at least suggest that there were victims beyond the ‘canonical’ five) before an admittedly entertaining set of chapters about the more prominent suspects (Montague Druitt, James Maybrick, the Duke of Clarence, etc, etc) in which the cases against each of them were taken apart. Marriott was somewhat put out that he wasn’t able to use his police contacts to have a go on HOLMES, the modern crime-recording database – he must’ve hated the recent BBC documentary, Jack the Ripper: The Case Reopened, in which Emilia Fox was allowed to do just that. Marriott’s eventual hypothesis was that the murderer might have been a sailor on one of the many ships in London’s docks which were not far from Whitechapel – not original, but it’s interesting how he’s able to research this (there’s not as much evidence as he’d hoped) and I like how he brought in the international angle – there were reports in the years immediately after 1888 of similar crimes in Germany and Nicaragua, although how much of that may or may not have been true is debatable (as with any Ripper study, Marriott is as quick to disregard any evidence that doesn’t support his theory as he is solid in his defence of the evidence that does). The ‘Ripper’ in this study turned out to be a German sailor who murdered his landlady in New York in 1894 and who, after being found guilty, met his end in the electric chair two years later. Apparently his lawyer thought he might have been Jack the Ripper. I’m not really convinced – we’ve had theories about Ripper suspects ending up getting done for different murders before. This, ultimately, was not the best of Ripper reads (Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed, which also tried to use modern investigatory techniques and came up with a very different but equally unprovable suspect, has the merit of being much better written), while I take my leave of Ripper speculation with a thought that maybe, given recent events involving Russia, the old one about the Ripper being a Russian agent acting to discredit the British police might be due a re-airing.

Moving to more recent history, I’ve encountered Dominic Sandbrook before. He’s the revisionist historian who wrote four books detailing British history – not just the politics, but a bit of everything including society, economics, popular culture, etc – between the Suez Crisis and the election of Mrs Thatcher. I read them out of order, of course, starting with the last one (Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979). I liked that one so much that I went back to the beginning and enjoyed the first one (Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles), then immersed myself in the second (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties). And so to the third – State of Emergency: The Way We Were, 1970-1974. The early Seventies in Britain were strange times indeed and Sandbrook, true to form, immerses the reader in this period which saw strikes, moral panics over the country’s youth (a recurring theme in Sandbrook’s books, the only thing apparently new about the skinheads being that they dressed different from the Teddy boys from just over a decade beforehand), all hell breaking loose in Northern Ireland, more strikes, a Home Secretary seemingly permanently drunk (stagger forward, Reggie Maudling), several decent sitcoms and massive cultural change while there was a PM who had a grand piano installed in Downing Street (Ted Heath, of whose various faults the worst seems by this account to have been a run of appallingly bad luck). Everything, right down to children’s TV shows (and the accompanying concern that kids were watching too much TV), football hooliganism and popular fiction (in particular Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man which, although published in ’75, is used as a prism here to explore radical chic) gets a look-in here; even life in the suburbs, much maligned at the time, gets a more positive going-over. As with Sandbrook’s other works, things draw to a grand climax in which events and themes previously mentioned draw together as a government teeters on the brink; here, it’s the Heath government declaring a state of emergency for the fourth time (yes, really) as Britain, in economic trouble even before the oil crisis of ’73, lurches into the Three-Day Week in which electricity was limited to conserve energy supplies (and, guess what, people panic-bought toilet paper). Worth a read, even if you haven’t read any other books in the series!

And then there’s Apostle: Travels to the Tombs of the Twelve by an American travel writer called Tom Bissell. The clue’s in the title – Bissell has taken it upon himself to visit the tombs (or sites of the tombs) of Jesus’s disciples. As travelogues go it’s an interesting challenge and Bissell – who kicks off by saying that he comes to this as a lapsed Catholic – has really done his homework in the arcane subject of who the twelve Apostles were (the four Gospels are not exactly in universal agreement here), what happened to them and where they ended up. Obviously in some cases their remains ultimately found their way to more than one place and some of this is highly disputed, but Bissell picks one site for each one and goes there to see what he can find out (the sites in question may raise some eyebrows – the site of an obscure monastery in Kyrgyzstan as opposed to Salerno Cathedral for St Matthew, for example, though what with several of the disciples being buried in Rome I guess he chose a site outside Italy for a bit of variation). On the way, he displays some impressively in-depth theological learning, sometimes perhaps too in-depth while in places he does tend to lose patience with the people he meets (his travels occurred over the course of several years, and at one point he notes that it was four years until he met ‘a person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity’). He’s at his best in the first chapter, to be honest – visiting Jerusalem in an attempt to find the place where Judas Iscariot hanged himself – and by the end it seems like he’s running out of steam, devoting a mere four-and-a-bit pages to his pilgrimage to Santiago di Compostela. A promising premise and plenty of insights, overall it’s more solidly good than anything else.

No comments: