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Post by dem bones on Apr 15, 2008 5:04:24 GMT
Robin Odell - Jack The Ripper, In Fact And Fiction (Mayflower-Dell, Sept. 1966) Blurb: In the autumn of 1888 the streets of London were streets of terror. The cause - a series of mysterious and apparently motiveless murders. Respectable citizens cowered behind shuttered windows and multi-locked doors. Ironically, however, it was not the respectable who were in danger. The victims were all drawn from the trade which necessity still compelled to haunt dark alleys and doorways at dead of night - the prostitutes.
Theories on the identity of the murderer have been many and various: that he was a fashionable doctor, even that he was a she - a midwife. Robin Odell has produced an absorbing factual reconstruction of all the crimes and a brilliant new theory, based on modern methods of detection, to solve the greatest mystery in British criminology. Most readers will accept his theory as the long-sought answer to a baffling real-life whodunit: as the most likely epitaph on a terror known as Jack The Ripper, In Fact And Fiction.Tom Cullen - The Life And Crimes Of Jack The Ripper (Fontana, 1973) The cover shows Chris Fenwick as John Richardson in the first episode of the BBC television series Jack The Ripper. The episode was directed by Leonard Lewis and the series produced by Paul Bonner and Leonard Lewis. Photograph by Jeremy Grayson.Daniel Farson - Jack The Ripper (Sphere, 1973) Donald Rumbelow - The Complete Jack The Ripper (Star, 1979) Blurb: Who was the man who murdered five prostitutes on the streets of Whitechapel in 1888? Was he a lunatic? A sexual pervert? A self-appointed moralist? A syphilis-crazed physician?
This is a revised edition of Donald Rumbelow's definitive work concerning the facts and the folklore surrounding that mysterious killer who craved not only blood, but infamy .... The Ripper.
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Post by Jaqhama on Oct 1, 2008 14:14:30 GMT
Love the cover on the first book.
I think it epitomises the Ripper/London fog/cobblestoned streets and err...half displayed puppies of his victims very well.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 21, 2009 2:22:54 GMT
Love the cover on the first book. I think it epitomises the Ripper/London fog/cobblestoned streets and err...half displayed puppies of his victims very well. Speaking of which, whoever provided the accomplished artwork for Stuart James' Jack The Ripper clearly only had two things in mind ..... Some more. Flick open the Pamela West novel and you're greeted with a friendly invitation from the publisher to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary! Marie Belloc Lowdnes - The Lodger (Four Square, 1966: Originally Methuen, 1913) Cover illustration uncredited [Josh Kirby ?] The Lodger is an acknowledged classic of mystery and suspense. This spine-chiller is a psychological study of a mass murderer which concerns itself with the burning question 'Why?'. From the first moment that Mr. Sleuth rents rooms in Mr. and Mrs. Bunting's lodging house we know that he is Jack the Ripper. Yet the story is so skilfully told that the reader is held breathless throughout. Why does Mr. Sleuth, obviously a gentleman, rent lodgings suitable only for the poor? Why does he turn all the pictures to the wall? Why does a man so gentle strike terror into the heart of Mrs. Bunting? As murder after murder is committed in a panic-stricken London, these and many more questions will hold the reader spell-bound until the last page.Spencer Shew - Hands Of The Ripper (Sphere, 1971) Cover illustration from the Hammer Films Production Hands Of The Ripper from the Rank Organisation.It was an autumn of terror in the shadowy streets of Whitechapel .... for JACK THE RIPPER roamed abroad leaving a bloody trail behind him ... But was the Ripper a man? Or were the hideous murders committed by a girl ... A girl possessed of the devil! Pamela West - Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper (Dell, 1989) London, 188. The city of Sherlock Holmes .... John Merrick, the Elephant Man .... Queen Victoria — and Jack The Ripper
On August 31, Inspector John West was first called in to London's Evil Quarter Mile to examine the horribly mutilated body of Mary Ann "Polly" Nicholls, a prostitute. Her throat had been cut, her organs ripped out, and, most strangely, there was no blood.
For ten weeks, a serial killer would butcher the streetwalkers of Whitechapel, taunting Scotland Yard with letters signed "Yours truly, Jack the Ripper." Was he a vampire? A religious fanatic? A thrill seeker? Inspector West would doggedly track down this inhuman killer — right into an official cover-up so well engineered, so shocking, that a century later Jack the Ripper's true identity can only now be revealed in a spellbinding, wickedly clever novel!
"OUTSTANDING ... AUTHENTICALLY RE-CREATING LONDON OF 1888 ... THIS IS A TALE IN THE GRAND MANNER, WITH A POIGNANT LOVE STORY AS PART OF THE TENSE BACKGROUND." — Publishers Weekly Patrice Chaplin - By Flower And Dean Street (Methuen, 1988) Cover illustration: Joanne Ryder Jack's back. The Ripper, most brutal and secret of murderers, makes a ghostly reappearance in present-day London when two people find themselves mysteriously possessed. Patrice Chaplin's awareness of the terrifying undertow of human life makes this novel a compelling and uncommonly chilling read.
"Chaplin dissects glamour like a surgeon cutting a beautiful face to excise the cancer underneath. Her prose and plots are staccato, short-winded and authoritative" - The Listener
"Patrice Chaplin makes good use of the effect of injecting fear into a situation that has been built up as familiar, safe and domestic ... A clever novel by someone with quite enough talent not to have to rely on any devices other than her own observation and quirky imagination." - TLS
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chastel
Crab On The Rampage
Where wolf? There castle!
Posts: 42
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Post by chastel on Feb 27, 2009 19:49:16 GMT
Hands of the Ripper is great movie, interesting characters and gorgeous look. Too bad I have not the book...
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Post by dem bones on Feb 27, 2009 21:22:23 GMT
Have you any Jack The Ripper novels you can recommend, chastel? I think i've about exhausted my supply now? The Stephen Knight was, of course, marketed as factual but is best enjoyed as one of the finest, most exciting Ripper novels ever written. I love it when Ripperologists single Knight and Donald McCormick out as playing fast and loose with the 'truth' and then advance Lewis Carroll, The Elephant Man, the Loch Ness Monster or some other completely innocent bystander as the REAL Jack the Ripper. Pretty sure I bought Jill Rips on the strength of the cover blurb, but now I can't remember if it lived up to its gory promise. Stephen Knight - Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution (Granada, 1977: originally Harrap & Co., 1976) Blurb: THE RIPPER MYSTERY REVEALED
Who really was Jack the Ripper? Was he a solitary assassin lurking in the shadows of gaslit London? A sexual maniac wreaking a personal vendetta on a sinful society? Or, was Jack the Ripper not one man but three - two cold-blooded murderers and an accomplice involved in this country's greatest conspiracy since Guy Fawkes? Now in this ground-breaking book, Stephen Knight produces, startling new evidence that the hitherto unsolved Ripper murders were in fact the culmination of a full-scale cover-up organized at the highest level of government and extending to the monarchy itself .......
`Mr Knight held my fascinated attention every single step of the way' - Colin Wilson, Books and Bookmen `The solution is plausible and brilliantly worked out' - The Scotsman `it is all very ingenious' - Daily Telegraph Frederick Lindsay - Jill Rips (Corgi, 1988) Blurb: JACK FOLLOWED JILL TO THE HILL...
Moirhill: a fictional suburb of Glasgow, one hundred years after the Jack the Ripper murders. In the red light district —a 'whoremaster's dark kingdom' of decaying tenements, of furtive sex in shuttered rooms, of undreamt of perversions, of gangland killing and corrupt politicians—the bodies of horribly mutilated males begin to appear in grim mimicry of the Ripper killings: but now the letter sent to a newspaper claiming responsibility is signed JILL.
'Brilliant... Jill Rips is harrowing, but its grim poetic vision makes it the best novel of its kind for years' - Richard Steele Today
'There is real talent at work here; lively laconic dialogue, prose as clean as a picked chicken bone and a conspicuous ability to carve a character out of a few lean words ... a chilling novel' - Alan Taylor Glasgow Herald
'Violent and vicious, Lindsay's unsparing tale beds down with the imagination like a succubus' - John Coleman The Sunday Times
'A chilling horror story ... extraordinarily well written and quite hypnotic in its effect' - Noeleen Dowling Dublin Evening Press
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Post by allthingshorror on Mar 1, 2009 13:14:43 GMT
First published Byren House HB 1987. This edition Berkley July 1989'HE WAS ONE OF HISTORY'S MOST NOTORIOUS KILLERS. HE SLAUGHTERED FIVE PROSTITUTES FROM THE BACK STREETS OF LONDON. AND HE TOOK HIS TRUE IDENTITY TO THE GRAVE...'
VICTORIAN ENGLAND, 1888:
A fiend with a knife moves phantomlike through fogbound London slums, burchering young women and escaping without a trace. The city is held captive by terror - no one knows when the madman will strike again...
Dr. Charles Randall, a specialist in mental disorders takes on the ultimate case of abnormal psychology; a mysterious patient seething with sadism and sexual loathing. And who may very well be the infamous Jack the Ripper.
And Jack never kills so savagely as when his identity is on the line...Knew I had at least ONE Ripper novel somewhere, and after a lot of cursing and rummaging around in the loft, I yelled in triumph. I think what drew me first to this book was that the author actually incorporates as much factual information as possible - so police records, letters, and even 'scientific' documents all get thrown in to good effect. And plus - the cover suggested that Jack could be a vampire, what with those pointy p's, dripping claret....
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Post by dem bones on Mar 1, 2009 20:59:00 GMT
Ta for digging that one out, mr. horror! As they Ripper centenary approached, they were coming thick and fast, that's for sure. Now this one .... I really struggled with it a few years back, abandoned it around halfway, but it's nagged its way onto the to re-read pile .... Colin Wilson - Ritual In The Dark (Pan, 1962) Blurb: "Not since Dickens has a British fiction-writer dealt with murder in a book of such size and seriousness "— Sunday Express
In this brilliant novel, Colin Wilson, now famous author of The Outsider, has recalled Jack the Ripper. In the year 1888, that notorious murderer terrorized London's East End — his victims always women. Transposing these ghastly crimes to our own day, the author has invented a sex-killer every bit as vicious as Jack the Ripper— and has set him loose on contemporary London. In a novel of classic proportions and biting realism, he has analysed the mind of a maniac — creating a spine-chiller that poses the profoundest of questions. See the guy on the next cover? He sure looks Jack the Ripper-ish, don't he? Despite reading this through, even enjoying it, I still can't remember if he's Dracula, The Ripper, both or a mechanical man. Another on the pile. Simon Hawke - The Dracula Capers (Headline, 1988) Mark Harrison Blurb: A Plague of vampires and werewolves fall on Victorian England in the late 1800's - but there's nothing supernatural about these creatures. They're genetically engineered monsters from the far future, dropped into the past as a devilish tactic in the Time Wars.
It's a mystery more baffling than any penned by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle - a cosmic riddle to stagger the imagination of the great H. G. Wells. Soon the creators of Sherlock Holmes and 'The Time Machine' join forces with the Time Commandos to combat the ageless evil which strains the very fabric of the universe ...The knock was repeated. "Who is it?" Neilson said cautiously. "H. G. Wells" Wells! it could be a trap! Eighth in the "Time Lords" series, this time set in Whitechapel. The dramatis personae also include Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Dr. Moreau and the evil mastermind behind the sinister plot, Nikolia Drakov. From memory, it's very entertaining stuff, although the Commandos themselves are not the most charismatic bunch. There's a Chronological History of the Time Wars to help you catch up if - like me - you skipped the first seven.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 2, 2009 23:32:03 GMT
Ritual In The Dark is well worth going back to, Dem. picked it up last year and read it in two feverish sittings. Wilson is a funny bugger when it comes to his fiction - sometimes it reads a little too much like he's trying to shoehorn all his theories into the story, and so something like Ther Mind Parasites reads like HP Lovecraft with CW peering over his shoulder saying 'Er, I think you'll find that idea comes from...' The Space Vampires, on the other hand...
Ritual... falls into the same category. The murderer wants to be caught, and spends that last few pages confessing to the narrator, who acts as the conscience of the reader - is the man disturbed and deserving of our sympathy? is he 'evil' in the sense of irredeemable? how do we feel about liking someone whom we would call a monster in other circumstances? - and it also diverts into many fields of crimonology that had begun to fascinate CW at the time. And yet, unlike The Mind Parasites, it gels. The transition from narrator's exposition of theory into the progression of events flows in a much smoother fashion, and you can really feel the dank London atmosphere permeating the world of bedsits - there's a great bit where the narrator has to break into the upstairs bedsit and encounters a man with a gramophone habit that is most peculiar. no, honest...
Really meaty, excellent book. Shorter and a little less heavy on theory, and recommended particularly because of its obsession with Crowlean magick, is The Schoolgirl Murders, which comes from a decade or so later. And not just because of its Vault-friendly title (like a NOTW teaser headline, eh?)
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Post by Steve on Mar 3, 2009 3:24:27 GMT
Ritual In The Dark is well worth going back to, Dem. Wilson is a funny bugger when it comes to his fiction - sometimes it reads a little too much like he's trying to shoehorn all his theories into the story... Ritual... falls into the same category - and it also diverts into many fields of crimonology that had begun to fascinate CW at the time... The transition from narrator's exposition of theory into the progression of events flows in a much smoother fashion, and you can really feel the dank London atmosphere permeating the world of bedsits... Shorter and a little less heavy on theory, and recommended particularly because of its obsession with Crowlean magick, is The Schoolgirl Murders, which comes from a decade or so later. Spent quite a while last year wrestling with Wilson's The Glass Cage which very much occupies the same 'dank bedsit/serial killer/kinkiness/heavy on the philosophical, occult, criminalogical exposition' territory. Lots and lots of talk, very little happens in terms of actual events, and yet I kept finding myself being drawn back to it every time I tried to put it down and read something a bit 'easier'. He can make exceptionally heavy going of things at times but still somehow manage to keep you hooked even as your brain's screaming out for him to get a move on. Then other times he's just nigh on unreadable. Strange.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 3, 2009 13:24:50 GMT
I came to Wilson's novels via a few non-fiction door-stoppers - The Occult, A Criminal History of Mankind, light stuff like that - and never really struggled with them, though, knowing me, i probably skipped huge chunks that didn't interest me (he has some very readable horror lit. interludes, if i remember, big on Lovecraft's The Picture In The House, The Call Of Cthulhu and C. M. Eddy/ HPL's The Loved Dead). But when it comes to his fiction, i felt completely out of my depth with Ritual In The Dark, and even the far slimmer The Space Vampires was a slog. Worst thing is, i know i'm missing out but ain't sure if i'm any readier for Ritual .... now than i was ten years ago - and it looks bloody massive.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 3, 2009 13:46:29 GMT
steve - exactly it! it does seem a chore at times, as it can be very dense with little seemingly happening (as opposed to my work, where it's very dense and fuck all happens), yet there are so many ideas bubbling under the surface that the book comes back to you after you've put it down and you have to return and check it out.
dem - i think this is because CW is a brilliantly instructive factual writer with a ral gift for clarity and cutting to the nub of a matter, yet is actually a little short on narrative skills. basically, he's not a natural fiction writer, so his shortcomings can sometimes expose his strengths. which, to return to steve's point, is why you come back even though the going has been tough. there's so much in there, but in fiction-mode his narrative skills are sometimes a little stretched. which is maybe why it works better with a little reflection.
but as i've just started francis durbridge's 'the pigtail murder', set in swinging chelsea and written in '69, daddio, what the hell do i know from intellektual?
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Post by franklinmarsh on Mar 3, 2009 15:12:22 GMT
Damn this! I've just picked up Wislon's biog of Ra-Ra-Rasputin. Got a feeling I did struggle through Ritual In The Dark years ago. Gave up on The Outsider. Did read the Space Vampires (Lifeforce tie-in) and would be intrigued to revisit as I've recently watched Lifeforce for the first time in a long time. Yay! The Occult! In the flourescent green cover! Interesting reading his piece on Shamen when Ebenezer Goode was top of the charts.
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Post by killercrab on Mar 3, 2009 17:50:41 GMT
and even the far slimmer The Space Vampires was a slog. >>
I'd heard good things about the book and read it last year - I really struggled to finish it! I wasn't prepared for what is a quietly monumental storyline. I just expected blood drinkers creeping around the capital - not clinics and stuff and metapsychics ! Or maybe it was trying to read it under low emittence lightbulbs in a caravan in wet Wales. Any book would of been a struggle under the circumstances.
A
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Post by dem bones on Mar 4, 2009 11:48:16 GMT
I doubt the conditions played too much of a part in it. This is quite possibly the most self-damning thing to say ever, but would have preferred a novelisation of Lifeforce - and you won't get too many people 'fessing up to that. Or will you?Don't know how I could have overlooked this epic slab of nastiness from the three faces of Michael Slade. Memo to publishers, this is how you write a blurb. Michael Slade - Ripper (New English Library, 1995: Black River, 1994) Chris Moore Blurb: JACK THE RIPPER IS DEAD, RIGHT? DON'T BET YOUR LIFE ON IT!
Who would slash the body to shreds, then rip the face off America's foremost Feminist - and hang her out to die? Who would take a pair of twin hookers on a terror trip that made death seem innocent and sweet? Who would turn a secluded island gathering of bright and beautiful people into a carnival of carnage? What grim and grisly figure stood, dripping knife in hand, at the end of the most horrifying trail of death and deception Detectives Robert DeClereq and Zinc Chandler ever followed?
A lot of people were dying to find out ......
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Post by dem bones on Mar 6, 2009 9:07:54 GMT
More jacking off with; Fortean Times #155 eds Bob Rickard & Paul Sieveking (Feb. 2002) Cover image: Ronald Grant archive. Image manipulation: Etienne Gilfillan Great cover but, especially given that it's Fortean Times, this is surprisingly flat as 'Jack The Ripper' specials go. It starts well, with a report on Patricia Cornwell's alleged (?) "monstrously stupid" vandalism of the Walter Sickert painting she'd purchased as she was convinced it would contain clues to his "double life" and nail him as Jack the Ripper. But Nick Warren's Who's Who of Ripperology - rather than providing the "round-up of the usual and unusual suspects" announced on the contents page, has been amended to "a round up of the usual suspects" by the time we reach the article proper, and we're all bloody bored to death with them. Finally, Mr. Warren again with a hatchet job on the (then) recently released From Hell, as if it were ever going to appeal to a Ripperologist. They'd probably even slag off Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde for crying out loud!
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