It's been so long since I've picked up a copy of Alan Moore's "From Hell" that it feels like I'm about to read it for the first time. In preperation for the new reading of the massive, blood-soaked tome I have procured a copy of the Johnny Depp film, which is a wonderful bit of cinema even if it is only connected to the comic book by title and general subject matter. I have also directed my thoughts back to London in 1888, and applied the fruits of my academic training towards solving the vexing and lingering homicides that changed the way the world thought about its madmen.
My New Suspects (based on an extensive literary training):
Charles Dickens:What better place to start one's examination of the most iconic Victorian crime wave than with the most iconic of Victiorian authors? Unfortunately, Dickens died in 1870, ruling him out as Saucy Jack. Besides, given Dickens' penchant for including casts of dozens, even hundreds of characters, there's no way he would have stopped at five victims.
Robert Louis Stevenson: While the murders were occuring, a stage production of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was playing in London. What better way to pump up interest in your strange psychological drama about the dark side within every man than by going out and knifing some prostitutes? It worked when Orson Welles did it to promote "Citizen Kane", and it might have worked for Stevenson.
Bram Stoker: Ah, but if we take a closer look at the stage production of "Jekyll", we notice that it was being produced at the legendary Lyceum theater in London. And what author is more associated with that theater than Bram Stoker, whose friendship with the Lyceum's biggest star, Henry Irving is legendary. What if, as a favor to his friend, Stoker decided to create a little buzz for the show? The plot thickens when one considers the famous "Dear Boss" letter of 9/25/1888, the letter which produced the name "Jack the Ripper" and includes the tantalizing sentence, "I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle". What author is more associated with blood than the creator of Dracula?
Oscar Wilde: However, the Jack killings might be a touch too theatrical for Stoker. It might be more appropriate to look at the greatest of the theatrical minds of the late nineteenth century, the divine Oscar. Unfortunately, Oscar did not have a new play out around that time, so we might have to reluctantly abandon our theory that the killings were a marketing technique (not unlike the Aqua Teen Hunger Force terrorist attack in Boston of 1/31/07). This leaves us with the potential that Oscar was doing early research for his own study of human degredation, "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which he would publish two years later. Or, the murders might have simply been an example of Wilde's aesthics run a little amok. In his preface to "Dorian Gray", he wrote, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.". If one replaces the word "book" with "ritualistic murder and postmortem mutiliation of ladies of ill-repute", a damning confession comes to light.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Nah. It's well known within literary circles that Tennyson loved the hos. Way too much to start killing them.
Aw hell, who am I kidding. We all know it was a Freemason plot, in conjunction with renegade Catholic sects, the Royal family, the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Illuminati. Actually, according to the new official story, the Ripper looked a lot like this guy:
(I made up way less of the details than you probably think.)
