Crime books (1)
Facts and fantasy
William Vivian Butler
The Complete Jack the Ripper Donald Rumbelow (W. H. Allen £4.95) Francis Camps Robert Jackson (Hart-Davis, MacGibbon £3.95) The Masters of Bow Street John Creasey (Hodder and Stoughton £3.50)
You can never entirely separate crime fact from crime fiction, no matter how hard you try. The most intriguing real-life crimes often are factualised fiction: a killer forces his dark internal fantasies on to the attention of the Outside world by means of an act of violence which, if sufficiently gory, itself sparks off fresh fantasies in the minds of the public. Anyone investigating the facts of the case is under pressure from its fictions from the start.
In The Complete Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow (himself, as crime novelist and police constable, a noted straddler of the two worlds of fact and fiction) makes a Herculean effort to strip Jack naked of romantic myths, and to present all the theories soberly and impartially — in the light of all the facts. Not that he forgets about the myths: the book salutes every aspect of the Jack the Ripper industry, mentioning books, plays, films, comic strips, TV spectaculars and the West End musical. It ends with a chapter on the droves of Jack the Ripper imitators, such as the Dusseldorf mass-killer, Peter K lartin: a sombre reminder that murderous fictions actually breed murderers, and that the best thing that could happen to the Jack the Ripper legend would be for it to be slit open from top to bottom, with its sordid entrails left hanging out. for good and all. Mr Rumbelow does his best for us in that direction. He omits absolutely none of the gruesome details. (His book, Colin Wilson assures us in the introduction, contains the first complete descriptions of the mutilations ever to appear in print.) In a brilliant scene-setting chapter, he shows us vividly what Whitechapel was really like in 1888, with the poor in such a plight that keeping alive was the real achievement, and murdering pathetically easy. He also rips into grandiose ideas about the Ripper's motivation. Jack, he suggests with a policeman's bluntess, was probably after twopennyworth of stand-up sex, strangled his victims when he was unable to achieve a climax, and conducted his celebrated on-the-spot postmortems in fits of impotent frustration. (Or perhaps — if I could make an unromantic suggestion of my own — in a Spirit of scientific inquiry, to find out what went wrong?)
Only mystery can relieve all this squalor, and Mr Rumbelow's best chapter is the one where he parades the majestic array of suspects that have fascinated Ripperologists over the years, from Mrs Belloc Lowndes's lodger, romantically thirsting for revenge on all fallen womankind, to William le Queux's Russian lunatic, seeking merely to expose defects in the English police system. The Duke of Clarence and his friends are there, of course — and incidentally, there really does not seem to be a finally satisfying explanation of why the police dropped the case so abruptly. As long as there isn't, I suppose the Jack the Ripper Show will go on. Although — writing almost in sight of the graveyard where an eighty-year-old woman was murdered only two years ago by the latest Ripper-crazed maniac — I can't help wishing that somehow, someone could ring the curtain down.
Jack the Ripper achieved fame, basically, by carving up five dead bodies. The great pathologist Francis Camps carved up more than sixty thousand in the course of his career. In recounting his most celebrated cases, Robert Jackson takes us on what amounts to a grand tour of the major crimes of the post-war era. Camps was in charge of connecting up all dem dry bones found at 10 Rillington Place; he dissected the torso on the Essex marshes, providing the first clues which led to the arrest of Donald Hume; he even appeared as a witness in the classic John Bodkin Adams trial. There are many other macabre cases, described succinctly, wittily and highly readably, but the squeamish should be warned that Mr Jackson is hardly less sparing of gory details than Mr Rumbelow.
Camps himself comes across as a character straight out of John Dickson Carr. An impatient, turbulent man (with whom an hour's conversation waS said to be an exhausting experience) he would "pass through a mortuary like a fire through a cornfield," working at such phenomenal speed that he was often dictating his repot on one corpse while opening up the next.
One would hardly imagine such a formidable hunter of facts to be under pressure from any fictions. And yet Camps must have been, all his life; and his last years saw him succumbing to a whole procession of fantasies. He wrongly. diagnosed his own last illness as inoperable cancer, and concealed it as long as he could — a fatal mistake, because he was really only suffering from a stomach ulcer which would have been highly responsive to treatment. He became a great admirer of the TV Maigret series and consciously tried to adopt Rupert Davies mannerisms. Strangest of all, he seemed to develop a pathological terror of pathologists: his greatest fear in later life was that Professor Keith Simpson, who he regarded as an enemy, would somehow get to perform a post-mortem on him. I doubt if even John Dickson Carr would have dared to give a hero such devastating irrationalities as these.
Fact and fiction remain uneasy bedfellows in The Masters of Bow Street, John Creasey's massive (506-page) family saga about the generations of struggle preceding the creation of the Metropolitan Police Force by Sir Robert Peel. Creasey's normal output was eight to 'twelve books a year. Having stockpiled novels frantically for three years, he was free to devote the last twelve months of his life entirely to The Masters of Bow Street. It was almost as if subconsciously he knew he was dying, and planned this book as a spectacular farewell.
That, surely, is how it should be judged: as a massive, bravura spectacular, a last-minute bombe surprise to round-off the incredible forty-year, six-hundred book feast which Creasey has given his fans. Here, in full display, are all the elements that made old Creasey Creasey: the driving narrative, the subtly understated heroics, the simple humanity, the strident small-1 liberalism, the all-embracing love of London — and, above all, the dogged vulnerable heroes, outwardly stalwart warriors, inwardly chronic worriers, badly needing (and inevitably finding) ministering-angel heroines to help them through.
I have revelled in this Creasey world far too often in my life to feel anything but misty-eyed at its sudden, marathon final appearance in fancy dress. An excited blurb calls The Masters of Bow Street "a great multigenerational masterpiece" and I simply can't bring myself to disagree. Under pressure from a grateful memory of all those years of Creasey fiction, it seems downright churlish not to co,ncede one fact.
William Vivian Butler has written The Durable Desperadoes, a study of some thriller-heroes in he days of Raffles and The Saint.
Previous page
