sickert vs maybrick vs ostrog vs gull vs merrick vs... (do not read if you are not morbid)

Soberly written by an actual historian, it's good on the political background — political turbulence inc.Fenian outrages, poor chain of command in police, newspaper campaigns against slums and child prostitution — and does its best to flesh out the victims as people, with families and past lives. No "definitive" solution offered as to identity, though he discusses several: Begg thinks the trail has gone cold, and that we'll never know.

Jack the Rippers: The Final Chapter
Paul H. Feldman (Virgin)

Journalistic — ie not very well written — but serious and thorough, it pursues the 1991 "Maybrick Diary", which common sense says is a recent forgery, but which forensic and historical analysis have nevertheless not yet unmasked. James Maybrick was a dissolute shipping merchant who died the year after the Whitechapel murders. His wife Florence was convicted of poisoning him, in a distinctly odd trial. Public outcry followed: first her death sentence was commuted, then — after 15 years — she was pardoned and freed. The judge was forced to retire after this case, and the Court of Appeal established as a result of the public fury. Maybrick was an arsenic addict: the journal purports to be an account of his evil secret life during 1888, when he discovered Florence was being unfaithful (he was in his 50s, she was in her 20s). In a way, though, the Ripper connection is a total McGuffin, in respect of what's interesting in Feldman's book — which is mainly a sketch of two present-day working-class Liverpool families, one descended from James's illegitimate children before the marriage, the other from Florence's ditto, the milieu from which the diary emerged, fake or real. Feldman, in his clumsy but sympathetic way, portrays people trying to live with a very terrible family event in their not-so-distant past: the complexity of feeling the great-grandchildren of children who had to live through the Maybrick trial (which was one of the Media Spectacles of the late 19th century) have towards it.

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper — Case Closed
Patricia Cornwell (Little Brown)

This book — written by a well-known author of procedural thrillers — is a disgrace, really. The case is only made by inference and innuendo, and certainly not closed. Walter Sickert, a renowned British artist, is indicted by virtue of being a cold cruel mysogynist who frequented East End music halls, some whose pictures seem unpleasant, creepy and violent towards women, who liked to bombard newspapers with letters, and — in the early 20th century — began to show an overt interest in the Ripper case. Also he kept his studios hideously untidy. Cornwell makes a suggestive case for the idea that a gifted artist was behind the surprisingly large number of communications the police received, letters, telegrams and postcards, between 1888 and the mid-1890s, from someone claiming to be Jack the Ripper (many of them use paint not ink, the "bloodstains" are painter's stain, the doodles and the variety of disguised handwritings suggest a skilled and horribly imaginative hand). She makes a very thin circumstantial case against Sickert being this artist; not even a sentence-worth's of case that the postcard writer was actually the murderer (the police at the time basically considered them to be nasty hoaxes). Her lightning sketch of Victorian London is confused and boringly moralistic: she also spends far too much time telling us how modern-day policing and forensics would have done a better job.