Along the way he argues, somewhat plausibly, that Elizabeth Stride, who is traditionally considered one of the five canonical Ripper victims, was not killed by Jack the Ripper. He then constructs vivid accounts of the murder victims and the police investigation. Rumbelow includes a bit of this, but it's mostly confined to the first chapter. Some books on the Ripper murders contain a fair amount of social history. Sadly, though, we just have to live with this sort of thing in true crime writing. I guess, perhaps, that scholarly apparatus puts off some readers, but the lack of proper citations undermines to some degree the intellectual seriousness of any historical book. I'm not sure why publishers find this acceptable. There are no notes of any sort, not even for the quotations, and the bibliography is less than a page. I'm not a big fan of history books without citations. Rumbelow's book is an enjoyable work of popular history, although I have to admit that I would have preferred it to be more scholarly.
It has seen several editions since its initial publication in 1975, and I've photographed the cover of the 2013 edition. One of the best known books about the Ripper murders is Donald Rumbelow's The Complete Jack the Ripper. So, of course, that requires reading about Jack the Ripper at some point. Wilson often wrote about serial killers, both in his fiction as well as his non-fiction therefore, I've been brushing up on my knowledge of serial killers.
I'm most interested in his fiction, and recently I've been going through his crime novels. In the future I'll explain why that is so.
During the past couple of years I've gotten interested in the work of Colin Wilson.
0 kommentar(er)
