The Diary of Jack the Ripper: The Discovery, the Investigation, the Authentication - Hardcover

Shirley Harrison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1856850501 ISBN 13: 9781856850506

Publisher: Smith Gryphon, 1993

Synopsis

This is Shirley Harrison's account of the discovery, investigation and authentication of the diary of Jack the Ripper. The book claims to finally solve the 105 year old mystery of the Ripper's identity.

About this title

About the Author

Shirley Harrison is the author of Jack the Ripper: The American Connection.

From Booklist

There are signs everywhere that this is going to be a hot item. Hyperion rushed the book into print earlier than the proposed publishing date; 60 Minutes picked up the story and aired a debate on the authenticity of the diary itself; bookstores throughout the country are filling display-windows with copies of the book's handsome red-and-black cover. And then there's the evidence of the book itself. Whether or not this newly discovered diary of the Ripper is authentic--and the book makes a powerful argument that it is--the tale it tells is absolutely riveting. The suggestion is that the Ripper was actually a cotton merchant from Liverpool who, furious over his American wife's infidelity, went periodically to London to butcher whores who walked the streets close to where he had first seen his wife walking with her lover. The diary itself is either an elaborate and brilliant hoax authored early in the century (paper and ink dating have established that it is between 60 and 100 years old) or the genuine article. It is full of the sort of gruesome details that only someone with access to police records recently released could have known: for instance, that the Ripper took the heart of one of the victims home. The man himself, James Maybrick, was a drug addict who gradually became more and more unhinged throughout the authorship of his mad diary and ended up being murdered by his wife. From all angles, it is an extraordinary tale that, when accompanied by numerous arresting photographs and the text of the diary itself (in facsimile and in type), leaves one at the heart of a horrific and mesmerizing crime--one that somehow seems to define our terrible and frightening age. Stuart Whitwell

Edition details

• Publisher: Smith Gryphon
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1856850501
• ISBN 13: 9781856850506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336