Influence
Despite its many inconsistencies, Knight's and Gorman's conspiracy theory has captured the imagination of other authors, who have made further modifications to the story. For example, Melvyn Fairclough's The Ripper and the Royals (London: Duckworth, 1991) asserted that Lord Randolph Churchill was the "third man", although Fairclough later disowned his own book and told reporters that "he no longer believes the theory". Andy Parlour, Sue Parlour and Kevin O'Donnell, authors of The Jack the Ripper Whitechapel Murders (St. Osyth, Essex: Ten Bells Publishing, 1997), supposed that Mary Jane Kelly was pregnant with Albert Victor's child instead of Annie Crook. These, and other books which promote Sickert from a knowing accomplice to being Jack the Ripper himself, such as Jean Overton-Fuller's Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (Oxford: Mandrake, 1990) and Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer (2002), are marketed as non-fiction books, but they are dismissed almost universally as derivative fantasies based on Knight's initial flawed analysis.
The conspiracy theory outlined in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution is fictionalised in the play Force and Hypocrisy by Doug Lucie. Four films have used elements of the theory: Murder by Decree, Jack the Ripper, The Ripper, and the Hughes Brothers' From Hell, which was based on a graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell.
Knight's theory features in the final book of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, Gods of Riverworld, and novels utilising Knight's book as a base include Robin Paige's Death at Whitechapel (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2000) and Anne Perry's The Whitechapel Conspiracy (London: Headline, 2001).
Read more about this topic: Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“My administration is pledged to follow the policies of Mr. Roosevelt in this regard, and while that pledge does not involve me in any obligation to carry them out unless I have Congressional authority to do so, it does require that I take every step and exert every legislative influence upon Congress to enact the legislation which shall best subserve the purposes indicated.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)