Bruce Robinson's 'They All Love Jack' is, I'm tempted to say, the only Jack the Ripper book you need to read, but it won't do if you don't know the basis chronology of events. There again, nearly everyone does know them by now. Robinson's text is encyclopaedic, his thesis closely argued and proved very convincingly through immense attention to detail, including accounts of many murders ignored by other writers and careful analysis of the many Ripper letters. Whether or not you subscribe to Robinson's rather baroque full theory - there is no mystery, just a cover-up; the Ripper was Michael Maybrick, a senior freemason who left masonic symbols at the sites of his killings, framed his own brother (via 'The Diary of Jack the Ripper') whom he then poisoned, and was assured of his own freedom through the vulnerability of the masonic establishment - it does seem unarguable that there was a cover-up at some level. I enjoyed his argument that the police and judiciary were hopelessly compromised by their loyalty to a Masonic establishment that went from the Prince of Wales downwards. As you might expect from the man behind 'Withnail', the book is written in an enjoyably irreverent style (like Orwell at his most polemical), and extremely readable:
'The English Establishment had a full-blown psychopath still active in their midst - but no problem, they could cope with the odd dead kid or two, even more with the odd dead whore. Their only problem was that if he got caught they all got caught, all the way up to the Grant Glutton. How could this profilgate prance around in his pinafore when he shared one with Jack the Ripper?' Excellent stuff. The only fault with the book is its structure -some 150 pages towards the end are devoted to the death of James Maybrick and the horrendously unfair trial of his widow Florence. Whilst this is undeniably gripping reading - a Stalinist show trial comes to mind - it could almost have been a separate book in its own right (I knew nothing about the case, though I had read about the comparable Charles Bravo case; his widow was also a Florence.)
It's a hefty book, but you'll read it fast, specially if you have any interest in how history can be re-written to suit the Establishment. He is enjoyably cynical about the cult of 'Ripperology' and quite rightly questions the veneration with which even modern authors treat the pronouncements of such as Donald Swanson and Melville McNaghten. I can't help wondering if, given there was coverup, the truth is simpler. What about Thomas Cutbush? After all, he was a Superintendent's nephew, but he did not have any complex psychological motivation beyond being a psychopath and loner.
