Jack The Ripper in Fiction - Literature

Literature

Works of fiction inspired by the Whitechapel murders arose immediately after the atrocities were committed. The short gothic novel The Curse Upon Mitre Square by John Francis Brewer, which features the murder of Catherine Eddowes in Mitre Square as a key plot element, was published in October 1888. Among works by other authors, In Darkest London by Margaret Harkness, who used the pseudonym John Law, was published in 1889. Harkness depicts the Ripper as a non-Jewish slaughterman who hides among the Jews in the East End of London.

Ripper stories appealed to an international audience. A "reputedly unsavoury" anthology of short stories in Swedish, Uppskäraren ("The Ripper") by Adolf Paul, was published in 1892, but it was suppressed by Russian authorities.

The character of Sherlock Holmes has been used often in Jack the Ripper fiction. The Spanish-language Jack El Destripador was an "amusing Sherlock Holmes pastiche" published shortly after the murders. Holmes was also used later in Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978), Ellery Queen's A Study in Terror (1966), John Sladek's Black Aura (1974), and Barrie Roberts' Sherlock Holmes and the Royal Flush (1998) amongst others. In 2009, Lyndsay Faye presents the Jack the Ripper mystery through Sherlock Holmes genre fiction in Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson.

The first influential short story, "The Lodger" by Marie Belloc Lowndes, was published in McClure's Magazine in 1911 and novelised in 1913. It features a London couple, Mr and Mrs Bunting, who suspect that their lodger, Mr Sleuth, is a mysterious killer known as "The Avenger", clearly based on the Ripper. Whether Sleuth really is "The Avenger" is left open: the focus of the story is on the Buntings' psychological terror, which may be entirely unfounded, rather than the actions of "The Avenger". In 1927, "The Lodger" was the subject of an Alfred Hitchcock-directed film: The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, and four other adaptations were filmed in later years.

In 1926, Leonard Matters proposed in a magazine article that the Ripper was an eminent doctor, whose son had died from syphilis caught from a prostitute. According to Matters, the doctor, given the pseudonym "Dr Stanley", committed the murders in revenge and then fled to Argentina. He expanded his ideas into a book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, in 1929. The book was marketed as a serious study, but it contains obvious factual errors and the documents it supposedly uses as references have never been found. It inspired other works such as the theatre play Murder Most Foul and the film Jack the Ripper. Jonathan Goodman's 1984 book Who He? is also written as if it is a factual study, but the suspect described, "Peter J Harpick", is an invention whose name is an anagram of Jack the Ripper.

Robert Bloch's short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" (published in Weird Tales in 1943) cast the Ripper as an eternal who must make human sacrifices to extend his immortality. It was adapted for both radio (in Stay Tuned for Terror) and television (as an episode of Thriller in 1961 written by Barré Lyndon). The science-fiction anthology Dangerous Visions (1967) featured an unrelated Ripper story by Bloch, "A Toy for Juliette", and a sequel by Harlan Ellison, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World", written with Bloch's permission. Bloch's work also includes The Will to Kill (1954) and Night of the Ripper (1984).

The many novels influenced by the Ripper include: A Case to Answer (1947) by Edgar Lustgarten, The Screaming Mimi (1949) by Fredric Brown, Terror Over London (1957) by Gardner Fox, Ritual in the Dark (1960) and The Killer (1970) by Colin Wilson, Sagittarius (1962) by Ray Russell, A Feast Unknown (1969) by Philip José Farmer, A Kind of Madness (1972) by Anthony Boucher, Nine Bucks Row (1973) by T. E. Huff, The Michaelmas Girls (1975) by John Brooks Barry, Jack's Little Friend (1975) by Ramsey Campbell, By Flower and Dean Street (1976) by Patrice Chaplin, The Private Life of Jack the Ripper (1980) by Richard Gordon, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) by Iain Sinclair, Anno Dracula (1992) by Kim Newman, A Night in the Lonesome October (1993) by Roger Zelazny, Ladykiller (1993) by Martina Cole, Savage (1993) by Richard Laymon, The Pit (1993) by Neil Penswick, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) by Peter Ackroyd, Pentecost Alley (1996) by Anne Perry, and Matrix (1998) by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry. Lyndsay Faye's Dust and Shadow appeared in 2009.

More recently, Giles Richard Ekins, has made use of the Ripper killings in his novel Sinistrari which includes appendices on the victims and prime suspects, and Gary M. Dobbs has offered a solution to the mystery in his novel, A Policeman's Lot. In 2008, Nicholas Nicastro published The Passion of the Ripper, which dramatizes Frederick Abberline's hunch that Jack the Ripper and Severin Klosowki (the so-called "Borough Poisoner") were the same man. In the 2007-2010 set of novels written by Talia Gryphon, Jack the Ripper is featured as a main villain and Dracula's right-hand man, capturing both Gillian Key and Kimber Whitecloud and keeping them hostage. In Key to Redemption he is later killed against Gillian near Castle Rachlav. Also there is "A Handbook for Attendants on the Insane: the autobiography of Jack the Ripper as revealed to Clanash Farjeon", the pseudonym of Alan Scarfe. Young Adult New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson released The Name of the Star, the first book in the Shades of London series, just this year.