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Ripper (Slade)
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Media: Specific Titles:
Fiction :
Ripper (Slade)
Author: Dr. Frederick Walker
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 08:03 pm |        | It is modern-day Canada, and a madman with an accomplice is recreating the crimes of JTR. This looks like a job for the mounties.
In fact, this is a better novel than it sounds. The writing is strong, with lengthy and vivid descriptions of even the smallest detail, characters with bizarre quirks and psychological baggage, and a plot that never quits. Since most of the emphasis is on the present day murders, I will reveal that the Ripper is assumed to have been Dr. Roslyn d'Onstan Stephenson. The chief interest for Ripper buffs is Slade's defence of this theory. He quotes Harris, of course, and adds 2 new arguments:
1) The first 4 murders form, not a standard crucifix, but a Tarot cross from the Hanged Man card. Disturbingly enough, this seems to be perfectly true.
2) Our mountie hero consults a statistician, who calculates the mathematical odds against 4 random murders forming a Tarot cross by sheer chance. The number is astronomical.
Armed with the Harris solution, our hero can predict the time and place of the final Canadian murder. It turns out to be the very murder mystery weekend to which he has been invited. Needless to say, the "corpse" turns out to be really dead -- in a locked room, natch -- and the usual Miss Marple deductions produce the identities of the murderous pair.
Marred by an unfortunate strain of sexism, this is an unsettling gorefest, best read after The True Face. |
Author: Sladist
Saturday, 08 May 1999 - 06:41 am | | Actually, Slade (or the Mountie who enquires about the odds) gives misleading information regarding the probability that four of the murders might be arranged in a cross-shaped configuration. The "astronomical" number quoted, in "Ripper", is the chance of the 4 crime-scenes forming the SPECIFIC cross which was laid out on a map, by the actual murders. But to check whether such an arrangement might transpire by sheer coincidence, you need to ask yourself how likely it is that any four sites (randomly chosen) would be arranged in ANY POSSIBLE cross-pattern ... not just one with those four specific corners! So the odds don't seem so remarkable, once you realize that ANY cross-like arrangement would've fed the "Ripper as Satanist" theory, just as well.
I've read several Slade novels, and ironically, the most recent one gave me another view of the cross-marked map of Whitechapel from "Ripper". In the novel "Primal Scream", another Mountie traces a child molester to his home address by checking the positions of the pedophile's crimes on a map, and applying principles of geographic criminology -- e.g. right-handed suspects flee to the left when spotted, and vice versa; people tend to commit crimes at a set distance from their homes, neither close enough to attract suspicion nor further than ease of access allows -- to the pattern. Well, I took another look at the map from "Ripper", with the cross on it, and it looks like the historical Jack actually turned left on the street where he killed Stride (the killing he had to abandon) and left again onto Commercial Road: exactly what a right-handed person would do, when leaving the scene of a crime in haste. He then flees along Commercial until he can slip around the bend, and thus out of sight, on Aldgate. This takes the Ripper DIRECTLY to the vicinity of his attack on Eddowes, that same night -- he's still prowling for a victim, having been interrupted with Stride -- and the actual second murder of the evening occurs in a side-street off of Aldgate, on the opposite side of the road from Stride's murder... and in a spot with THREE viable escape routes! (Precisely what the Ripper must've been looking for, after being forced to flee the scene of his first kill, don't you think...?) The fact Jack's last known victim was killed indoors might have a lot more to do with the killer's growing fear of being spotted, when acting out his homicidal fantasies on the streets, than anything to do with his motives (mystical or otherwise).
So, in a way, I think Slade HAS given me a valid insight into the Ripper murders ... but it's not the one "Ripper" presents! If you ask me, Slade's book might've been better if, at the end, the RCMP labs had run DNA tests on the bloody ties from the old D'Onstan trunk... only to discover they'd been stained with PIG'S blood: that D'Onstan was just another fraud "magician" of his era, and the two modern-day killers who'd idolized him were living their own delusions rather than the Ripper's. |
Author: Ashling
Saturday, 08 May 1999 - 03:41 pm | | Hi Sladist. If you're new - welcome aboard.
1. "Geographic criminology" ?? ... A fictional cop's wife in Stephen King's Rose Madder says right-handed criminals turn right when fleeing.
2. IMHO JtR didn't kill Stride ... My #1 suspect is her boyfriend, Michael Kidney.
Take care,
Ashling |
Author: Sladist
Sunday, 09 May 1999 - 06:01 am | | Hi, Ashling! Thanks for the welcome. :-)
IIRC, "Primal Scream" says that right-handed criminals flee to the left when they're attempting to remain unseen. I'd assume that so long as they've not yet been spotted by an approaching witness, they try to be "tricky" by going against a natural impulse to veer toward one's dominant hand. (Perhaps the Ripper heard someone coming up the street, or somebody waking up in one of the nearby houses.) Criminals DO veer towards their dominant hand, to run at full speed around obstacles ... which is what they'd do when someone (such as a cop) has already seen, and is pursuing, them. |
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