The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal - Hardcover

Van Onselen, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802716415 ISBN 13: 9780802716415

Publisher: Walker Books, 2007

Synopsis

A masterwork of historical reconstruction―the life and times of an arch criminal who may well have been Jack the Ripper.

During the three turbulent decades before World War I, Joseph Silver became the greatest criminal of his time, perfecting his skills as a burglar, gun runner, jewel thief, and ultimately trafficker in prostitution and female slavery across four continents. He was notorious even among his competitors at a time when such business was rampant on both sides of the Atlantic, and he covered his tracks with extraordinary skill.

A chance encounter with Silver's career in South Africa set Charles van Onselen on a twenty five-year obsession: a journey to reconstruct the shadowy life and times of―in some ways to match wits with―a devious master criminal. From Russian Poland in the 1860s, where Silver was born Joseph Lis, to London in the 1880s, turn-of-the-century New York, Argentina, and Africa, van Onselen recaptures the dangerous demimonde of the Atlantic world. Silver's notoriety was found among the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries; what those in law enforcement kept to themselves, however, was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates built on vice, only to have him outwit them as he moved in the risky space between police and prostitutes.

Such is the meticulousness of van Onselen's research that The Fox and the Flies is as rich in history as it is in the detail and drama of Silver's career, as layer after layer of his life and times are revealed. And it has an extraordinary pay-off, for van Onselen contends that Joseph Silver's darkest secret of all lay in London in the autumn of 1888 when, before he embarked on his legendary life of crime, he was, indeed, Jack the Ripper.

About this title

About the Author

Charles van Onselen is an acclaimed biographer who has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale. His works on the social history of southern Africa have won him, among others, the American African Studies Association's Herskovits Prize, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies' Trevor Reese Memorial Prize, and the Sunday Times' Alan Paton Award for nonfiction. He is currently research professor in the faculty of humanities at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Award-winning South African historian Van Onselen has crafted a riveting narrative portraying the life and crimes of Joseph Silver (1868–1918), a violent man whose story is almost too improbable to be true. Silver terrorized women on four continents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising from humble Jewish roots in a small Polish town to become a leading trafficker in female slaves. With masterful survival instincts, Silver locked horns with the forces of law and order in England, the U.S., South Africa and Argentina, often corrupting those who pursued him and even, in a jaw-dropping display of chutzpah, serving on occasion as a police officer himself. Despite the overall fascination with Silver, Van Onselen's excellent book will receive more notice for its final chapter, in which he makes a compelling circumstantial case for Silver being Jack the Ripper. While the evidence is somewhat more speculative than the author concedes, he deserves credit for identifying a man with a history of violence against prostitutes who apparently lived in the heart of Whitechapel during the 1888 Autumn of Terror, and who matched some eyewitness descriptions of suspicious figures seen with the victims shortly before their deaths. B&w photos, maps. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0802716415
• ISBN 13: 9780802716415
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672