I’ve had Jack on the brain recently.<\/p>\n
Jack the Ripper, that is.<\/p>\n
My friend Michael sent me an e-mail a few days ago. He’d just seen From Hell<\/i>, the Hughes Brothers film adaptation of the Alan Moore\/Eddie Campbell comic book miniseries about the Whitechapel murders of 1888. I’d started to write a response, left it unfinished, and in taking the nuclear option on my weekend e-mail woes deleted the draft I’d begun.<\/p>\n
I remember a little of what I did write, mostly related to the utter stupidity of Alan Moore adapting Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution<\/i> as the basis of his comic book, when every authority on the subject has discredited that theory of the Ripper series fifteen different ways. Casebook: Jack the Ripper<\/a> has a good page refuting the Royal Conspiracy theory<\/a>; while the arguments made apply directly to Knight’s book, they apply to Moore as well because of Moore’s fidelity to Knight’s theory.<\/p>\n But that’s not the only reason I’ve had Jack on the brain.<\/p>\n In 1988 an anthology was published, Red Jack<\/i>, featuring stories about Jack the Ripper. I haunted used book stores for years looking for a copy of this book, not just for my interest in the Ripper murders. Red Jack<\/i> also reprinted an Ellery Queen novel, A Study in Terror<\/i>, in which Sherlock Holmes investigates the Whitechapel murders. Yes, other books have pitted Holmes against the Ripper, most notably Edward Hanna’s The Whitechapel Horrors<\/i><\/a> and Michael Dibdin’s The Last Sherlock Holmes Story<\/i>, but this was Ellery Queen, and I wanted to read it.<\/p>\n While at Barnes & Noble on Friday I discovered that Red Jack<\/i> has been reprinted by iBooks<\/a>, under the new title Jack the Ripper<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n I picked it up. Thus far I’ve only had the opportunity to read the introduction, and I may not read any of the stories except for A Study in Terror<\/i>.<\/p>\n It’s nice to have in my Sherlock Holmes collection, though. Another hole plugged!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve had Jack on the brain recently. Jack the Ripper, that is. My friend Michael sent me an e-mail a few days ago. He’d just seen From Hell, the Hughes Brothers film adaptation of the Alan Moore\/Eddie Campbell comic book miniseries about the Whitechapel murders of 1888. I’d started to write a response, left itContinue reading “Red Jack”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[893],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","tag-jack-the-ripper","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}