Jack the Ripper event in Middlesbrough

I went to a Jack the Ripper event at Middlesbrough central library last night and I was very impressed. I wasn’t expecting quite so much forensic science because it was part of the literary festival but I’m certainly not complaining. I got a fair bit out of it for the novel I’m writing; especially about the Whitechapel area in London at the time. I have to be honest here: I wasn’t expecting the evidence against the guy from Hartlepool to be quite so solid as a new potential candidate to the JtR but it really was.

I have loads of stuff to be considering for good material for my novel, and I may even change who I’m scripting as victims based on some of the evidence that was presented – I found out some things which made the situation in Whitechapel seem even worse than it did before, and yes that is some feat considering it was Jack the Rippers stomping ground. With over 1 murder per day in an area of 30,000 throughout the 1880’s I should have a great time describing how a Jack the Ripper copycat managed to pass of his own victims as Jack’s.

My Novel

OK then: just got given a few new books for my birthday which will help with the next one (the supernatural horror, I know it’s hard to keep up but I tend to have a lot of projects on-the-go at once; it makes life interesting) The novel I’m writing is a post-Jack the Ripper story, focusing on the murders which followed Jack the Ripper in London. JtR has been done to death (no pun intended) so I decided to focus on some of the later Whitechapel murders.

On a funny note I had a chat in the staff canteen of the hospital I volunteer at when I went in for a job interview a few weeks ago with one of my colleagues about my novel. The JtR murders had a certain level of surgical skill and the ones that followed were plain savage, yet at the time some people considered them to be “Ripping’s” at the time – I made the remark that if this was accurate then ‘Jack the Ripper killed some people: and then he went mental’: totally forgetting that in conversation context matters and I was talking about what was done to the body rather than his state of mind. Oops.