Robert Bloch - The Night Of The Ripper (Grafton, 1986)
Blurb:
On the loose in the shadowy, gaslit streets of London's East End - Jack the Ripper.
Baffled by the horrific series of murders in Victorian London, Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline is struck by the fact that all the killings have taken place near the London Hospital - famous for its surgeons.
A young American doctor at the hospital, Mark Robinson, comes to share Abbeline's suspicions, but finds himself caught in a hall of mirrors in which one person after another seems to be a possible murderer ...
Who was Jack the Ripper? In this chilling, harrowing tale of terror, master of the macabre Robert Bloch proposes a new answer - as shocking and ingenious as the conclusion of his classic Psycho. Or maybe not: Here's Denis Meikle's considered verdict
"Bloch's obsession with the Ripper killings never waned in his 60-year career as a writer of weird tales, just as his knowledge of, or insight into, the crimes never improved. This deadly combination eventually produced The Night Of The Ripper in 1984, a novel so bad, so miserably uniformed, as to defy analysis.."
Jack The Ripper: The Murders And The Movies(Reynolds & Hearn, 2002)
I remember finding the novel pretty ropey the first time around, largely due to Bloch over-egging it with suspects and his insistence on having his lovable cockerneys talk gibberish masquerading as 'authentic' slang, but Meikle's scathing remarks have persuaded me it's time for a rematch.
Whitechapel, August 1888 is evidently very much as Brian Clemens imagined it for
Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde, the devilishly foggy streets peopled by Pearly Kings & Queens, prostitutes, sailors, Doctors, a dancing bear and an organ-grinder. We join young Eva Sloane as she makes her way home from the Paragon Music Hall. A man in a deerstalker who reminds her of Prince Eddy smiles at her as she passes toward the Jewish Cemetery ... and straight into the path of stampeding cattle who've broken out of a slaughterhouse. Just as it seems she'll be trampled, strong arms seize her and hold her to the railings. The danger over, she turns to thank her rescuer. It is the man in the deerstalker. He rushes off in the fog.
Next we turn to
The Angel & Crown, a sleazy bar populated by the criminal classes, seedy tarts and Dr. Albert Trebor, an eminent surgeon from the London Hospital. He is entertaining an American guest, Dr. Mark Robinson, by teaching him the local lingo. Much to Trebor's fury, they're interrupted by a prostitute, Martha Tabram. Trebor sounds off about Martha and her kind, "thousands of them, drunken and riddled with disease, spreading disease every time they spread their legs", but Mark is already up and out the door. He wishes to give Martha and her friend enough pennies for their nights doss that they won't have to go with their rough-house clients. Trebor reaches under the table and removes his brown surgical bag.
The following morning, Martha Tabram's mutilated body is found in George Yard.
Eva Sloane, it transpires, is a trainee nurse at the London Hospital and, when she attends one of Dr. Hume's medical classes (she doesn't feel comfortable around Dr. Hume: the man seems to take an obscene pleasure in his scalpel wielding), who should she bump into but her knight in shining armour from the previous night, deerstalker man - Dr. Mark Robinson! He tells her a little about himself - how he's a qualified doctor who can't stand the sight of blood, how he is studying psychiatry, how he graduated at Michigan with a fellow named Herman Mudgett ("I often wonder what became of him; he's probably enjoying a brilliant career as a surgeon right now!") - and asks her for a date. Eva explains that she'll be staying in Reading with her father until the end of the month, but agrees to see him on her return. Of course, whatever dreadful business she has to attend drives all thought of Mark from her mind. When she forgets her prior engagement, he storms off into the night. You can't blame him: he'd bought two tickets to see Richard Mansfield in
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde at
The Lyceum, and now he'll have to drag bloody Dr. Trebor along with him or go alone.
That night, after the show, Polly Anne Nichols is butchered in Bucks Row.
to be continued ...marksamuelsDem
Does this one link up in any way with the Bloch story "Yours truly, Jack the Ripper", i.e. by incorporating a supernatural explanation?
All best
Mark
Franklin MarshThis looks tremendous fun. Not least because of the experts dissing of Bloch. Picked up RBs Psycho 2 fairly recently. Must get around to some of these!
demonik No supernatural content in this one, Mark, just red herring upon red herring upon ...
Is it Mark Robinson, with his quick temper and mysterious comings and goings in the fog? Dr. Trebor with his ever-present bag of surgical instruments and pressing need for a woman? Then there's 'Leather Apron', the Jewish cobbler who loathes his nickname and wishes the press would refer to him as 'Jack.' Prince Eddy, the not-so-closet homosexual who takes umbrage at the tarts who snicker at his preference for "backgammon." James Stephens, Eddy's tutor, who initiated his charge into the joys of man-on-man orgies is yet another suspect, to say nothing of Dr. Hume who gets a hard-on in the presence of death and attempts to grope Eva in the waxworks on the Whitechapel Rd. How about Eva? Is she Jill the Ripper? And who's this mysterious lover of hers ....?
I could go on. Then there's the guest star appearances: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, G. B. S., Walter Lees, the Elephant Man - if Bloch had fingered one of these as the killer it would only have been slightly less implausible than the ending he eventually arrives at (which again brings us back to Brian Clemens!).
My guess as to why Meikle has taken such a dislike to it is that he takes his Ripper research seriously and Bloch makes a hash of some of the 'facts' and bends others to fit his plot. And, of course, the hero
has to be an American ...
Can't think why I got so annoyed with it the first time around though, as even the late introduction of Jack doesn't seem quite so outlandish to me these days. Fast paced, 250 pages - it reads like Bloch's taken the 'factual' Ripper books by the likes of Donald McCormack, Stephen Knight and Robert Odell and rewritten them as a good old-fashioned pulp potboiler with added
Psycho-babble. The use of "authentic" slang - lifted from the Glossary in Kellow Chesney's
The Victorian Underworld - is the aspect that really grated on me again, but if you approach it as quick, trash read and don't take your Ripper lit too seriously, it is indeed not too far short of "tremendous fun."
And it would make for a great
Murder By Decree type movie.
Incidentally, that waxwork museum really existed on the spot now occupied by the
East End Saree Store at 259 Whitechapel Road. I did some *cough* research into the subject for a site that never came off, but I've still got the notes for that particular entry. Wanna see 'em? Well, it doesn't really matter as you're going to anyhow ...
TERRORS OF THE WAX MUSEUM
Following the Hanbury Street murder, the aged proprietor of a shabby waxworks emporium (the very same derelict greengrocers where Sir Frederick Treves first encountered a horrifically abused Joseph "The Elephant Man" Merrick in November 1884 ) saw in the Ripper crimes a nifty means of boosting his pension fund. A dash of red paint here, a lick or two there and a trio of redundant models were deemed suitably reupholstered to take centre stage in his new exhibit. The revamped attraction, billed as "Horrible Whitechapel Murders - See the George Yard, Bucks Row, Hanbury Street victims", was promptly shut down on the not entirely groundless premise that it caused an affront to public decency. The police had far more pressing concerns than seeing to it that our entrepreneur would abide by his prohibition, and he and his grim tableau were soon back in business. Here's the considered verdict of one lucky punter as delivered in the
Pall Mall Gazette.
"There is at present almost opposite the London Hospital a ghastly display of the unfortunate women murdered by what the slummers call 'that bloody demon' ... an old man exhibits these things, and while he points them out you will be tightly wedged in between a number of boys and girls, while a smell of death rises into your nostrils, and you feel as if your throat were filled up by fungus".
pulphackI tend to avoid ripper stuff these days as so many 'ripperologists' talk bollocks. like we're ever going to know who did it. like it matters. the important thing about it historically is the stuff around it - the police reaction, the press, the invention of the bogeyman figure 'jack' became and the way the aforementioned forces conspired (unwittingly or otherwise) to form that figure.the fact that every tosser and his dog have 'the true ripper' books with ridiculous evidence at this remove is both funny and sad at the same time.
so if mr bloch pissed them all off, i want to read this now! anyway, what better way to approach an urban myth than to rewrite it to suit you?
demonik I despise the Ripper industry - especially the seriously sick element who tart up their beloved ripped up Mary Kelly photo's for casebook.org and talk about the victims as though they were on first name terms - but I usually find the 'factual' books interesting bollocks in their own right, notably Stephen Knight's as far fetched as a bucket of shit from China
The Final Solution and the various theories put forward in
The Mammoth Book Of Jack The Ripper.
Denis Meikle is more of a
The Lodger/
The Hands Of Mr. Ottermole man, so he was never going to get on well with Bloch's more graphic moments and it's obvious from the text that pulp is not his thing at all. Donald Rumbelow - a big fan of Bloch's
Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper (always found that one over-rated myself) - was equally mortified. I think it was the fact that Bloch preceded each chapter with a true torture moment from history that got to him.
pulphackooh, it sounds better all the time! i agree with you about the ripperologist industry. pretending their serious when all they're interested in is being lurid under the guise of being scholarly.
spot on about things like stephen knight, though - that book is one cracking read, obvious bollocks, and a great novel! yesh, sure it's true...
worst one for me in recent years has been patricia cornwell. someone bought my mum that for xmas a few years back, and i borrowed it. what toss! great for the pathology porn brigade though (er, that's me, i guess...sort of...)