As with everything, even with famous crime, there is a period in which interest in it vanishes before there comes renaissance. This began in the early 20th century when the Ripper crimes began to enter their own public legend. As with all legends, it is the most sensational elements that linger in the ether and then take form when the renaissance comes. Mitigating clues and evidence are lost. Hype and hyperbole take their place. Theorizing sprouts from half facts and clouded memories. For example, Arthur Conan-Doyle had popularized that a woman, euphemistically labeled by him as Jill the Ripper, might have been responsible. Through the dim haze of popular rendition it was recalled that two hats were found with Frances Coles. Could the other hat have been the killer’s? (Even at the time of Sadler’s arrest, the two hats inspired the newspapers to wonder if a woman and not Sadler was responsible.) There was, of course, nothing to it. Both hats belonged to Coles. In 1905, interest in Jack the Ripper had inspired a tour conducted by Dr. Gordon Brown. He led a number of luminaries, included Conan-Doyle, around the murder scenes. He insisted there was anatomical knowledge, but it was that of a butcher, not a doctor. In itself this showed how City C.I.D. still clung to its own theory of a maniac in Butcher’s Row. When journalistic interest revived, it was the penny vibe of a fiendish Simon Pure or mad doctor, an image helped no little by Griffiths via Macnaghten’s confidential memorandum. Marie Belloc Lowndes encrypted this image for us in The Lodger, her bestseller in 1913, a book which has inspired several film adaptations since then. In 1926, the first— The Lodger: a Story of the London Fog— was a silent-era screamer by no less than Alfred Hitchcock. As its title suggests, it gave us all the props and the moody backdrop. Thereafter this image had little to contend with. The Ripper became the embodiment of sophisticated or pious evil— the top hat, heavy overcoat, doctor’s bag concealing his fiendish instruments and trophies. Many writers have rightly lamented that Jack the Ripper became one of the most romanticized figures in literature. In 1965 the two first weighty studies were published, and we were given two extremely different (but not so original) images of the Ripper. Tom Cullen (Autumn of Terror) gave us the brooding Montague Druitt, a middle class, educated man fighting hereditary insanity. His twisted goal was social reform. Robin Odell gave us a low-class Jewish (even Hasidic!) butcher in Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction. Since then the theories have reached out to include Royal conspiracies and numerous subplots. Amateur and professional sleuths alike have sought the most elusive serial killer. Jack the Ripper became real again. Someone had to have been the Ripper. Writers thereafter broke the mold of toff and lout. They have proposed candidates and they have molded them. From a patchwork of clues, they have given us an array of suspects
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 16:58:22 +0000
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