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Jack the Ripper (Daniel)
Casebook Message Boards: Ripper Media: Specific Titles:
Fiction :
Jack the Ripper (Daniel)
Author: Dr. Frederick Walker
Thursday, 19 November 1998 - 07:58 pm |        | I generally avoid "novelizations" of movies, unless I'm given one as a birthday present and can't decently get out of reading it. But I'm glad I finally got around to reading the novel version of the Michael Caine JTR miniseries. Against all odds, it is one of the best Ripper novels ever written, and that rare thing, an improvement on the movie.
A frame story is added, with an elderly Chief Inspector Godley telling the tale in 1941 to the novelist's father, and swearing him to secrecy until the files are opened in 1988. This "informant story" lends credibility to the weak plot Daniel is saddled with.
Since Daniel is supposedly editing Godley's manuscript as told to his father, he can intersperse his own research and editorial comments. He corrects the movie's many mistakes as "lapses in memory" by the octogenarian Godley. He also serves up his own theories, in the guise of debating the authenticity of the manuscript. (Daniel's arguments for the "authenticity" of a screenplay are more convincing than Shirley Harrison's arguments for the authenticity of the Maybrick diary!) He dismisses the Burke/Hare motive, deems Mrs. Long's testimony unreliable and criticizes ripperologists for exaggerating the importance of witnesses they agree with.
In what must have been a courageous decision, Daniel concludes that the movie solution forced on him is "absurd." He is absolutely right. He then gives 3 other endings from the cutting room floor and calls one of them "the most cogent" -- a local man with a rational motive, and powerful friends who could have shielded him.
Ultimately, this book is hamstrung by the same two flaws that cripple the movie: the false presumption that the double event murders were impossibly far apart, and the wrong list of suspects. The novel, like the movie, considers Chapman, Dr. Llewellyn, Mansfield, Gull, Netley, Prince Eddy, Lusk and Lees. It is highly unlikely that the real killer is anywhere on that list. But Daniel must be applauded for making his own choice from that list.
This is the most impressive "novelization" I've ever read. |
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