Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #42: "The Silent Judge": A Tale of Jack the Ripper

I respond to calls for submissions a lot, especially ones that touch on an period of history I liked and about which I know something. I had written in response to a call for stories on Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer who terrorized London in the late 1800s. I knew a lot about that era from spending hours reading Victorian novels in graduate school:  Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and a whole parade of lesser lights. These gave me a feel for the era and the culture of the time. I thought I would try my hand, read up on Jack the Ripper, and sent the story off. Like so many stories, the publisher rejected it. But, like Winston Churchill, I never, never, never give up. I sent it out to a magazine called Alt Hist, which deals in variations on well-known historical incidents. The story made it into this journal.

Newspaper illustration of a murder victim of Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper is one of those perennially fascinating figures. Maybe he's so fascinating because we don't know who he was. There are endless speculations on the matter, and some fantastical candidates have been put forth in the attempt to identify him and solve the murder mysteries that have never been solved. My story, "The Silent Judge," attempts the same thing, though it carries no claim whatsoever of being true. It is entirely a fiction. But, when the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer described village women crying when straw dolls were thrown into the raging river at harvest time, and speculating that once real live young women were the objects of this practice, he has one of the women muse, Was straw all that different from flesh? Is speculative and imaginative writing all that different from forensic investigation?

I don't know, but I like the story. A man who was a customer to Mary Jane Kelly, a prostitute and the last victim of the Ripper, finds out about her death. Like many Victorian men who consorted with "free women" (as prostitutes were euphemistically referred to) he is respectably married, in business, and the father of children. But Mary had held a place in his heart. When he reads of the brutality of the murder, he resolves to do something and begins his investigation.

He finds a young woman who shared a room (and a common occupation) with Mary and manages to track her down. She has a letter the killer wrote to the murdered woman. It gives some leads, though not many. He notes the angry down-slant of the handwriting, the educated vocabulary, and, most importantly, a location, Notting Hill—though it does not supply an address.

Using techniques he learned from reading Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter," he begins to collect evidence. The same man who wrote the letter patronized whores, so he decides a brothel would be the best place to start looking. He finds one in Notting Hill that caters to high-class men and pays for one of its younger women.

Whore in the Killers video "Mr. Brightside"

I got the idea for the brothel from the video for "Mr. Brightside" by the Killers. The exotic girls sumptuously dressed and made up in sexy, exotic costumes inspired the high-class place the narrator goes to. He does business with several of the women there, returns one night and sees one is missing, asks, and is told the girl has been beaten. He finds her and she tells him about a man who comes every two of three months and beats and chokes her. She says that if he plans to kill the man, she will tell him no more. After he tells her about Mary and says the man will eventually kill her, his informant tells him all she knows: that the man lives in Saint David's, a section of London.

He finds the killer, trails him, and is puzzled that he visits Mary's grave. After analyzing other behavior, he realizes that Jack the Ripper wants to be caught. He wants to be identified so his deeds and name will be known forever. This, the narrator resolves, will never be.

He follows Jack into a sleazy, run-down section of London—the kind Dickens wrote about in Bleak House and Hard Times—and confronts him. The Ripper asks him if he is from the police. He says no and then this exchange takes place:

            Private investigator?”

            “A lover of Mary Jane Kelly,” I replied.

His smile faded. He looked fearful.

“Are you arresting me?”

I shook my head.

“No. I am going to kill you—right here and now. No one will ever find out who you are. You will not have the notoriety of which you have dreamed. No one will ever know your name.”

Several factory whistles go off and the narrator shoots, making certain he kills the man. He absconds and is never a suspect. The police cannot identify the body and assume it was a robbery and murder. The matter ends there.

The story is being written as the narrator near the end of his life. His wife has gone on. He has the satisfaction of having left a better world for his children, one in which the name of a brutal serial killer is not spoken. He writes of Jack the Ripper, "His name will ever be unknown. The name of Mary Jean Kelly lives on in peoples’ hearts and peoples’ sympathies."

The issue of Alt Hist featuring 

"The Silent Judge" is available in print

at this link.

For more titles see my Writer's Page

Read The Prophetess for some New Testament horror,

exorcism, and suspense.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #13: Wherein I Write a Real, Genuine Horror Stor

In an earlier post, I said that I did not write what is called "dark horror" and that the stories I do that fall in that genre are mostly "soft horror"—with a happy ending and one where the evil forces are defeated and the good guys win, though it might be a hard-fought and costly battle. I did do one story that is more traditional, where the evil creature dominates and the protagonist is captured by a sinister tormentor in the end of the tale.

I like to write about people who teach literature. Of course, it's what I've done for a living many years, and Hemingway said write about what you know. A literature teacher, Scott Sheridan, meets an attractive woman, Lucinda Arnold, at a book sale. Scott likes his work, but he is vexed by the politics, the bullying, and the egotistic blathering of those who have rank on him in the Literature Department—in other words, I paint an accurate picture of what it's like to work in the academic world!

He and Lucinda talk about books, read together, and, 

soon, are sleeping together. It's a nice relationship. Scott is up for tenure has is nervous because a capricious colleague named Pauline who outranks him is insinuating she might block his tenure—meaning he will have less money and less security. Her reasons are simply that she has power over him and enjoys exercising it and watching him squirm (as often happens in the academic world). Lucinda visits him is introduced.

They talk about Chaucer. Pauline mentions the "Reeve's Tale" one of the Canterbury Tales and notes that the main character in it has a "boil" on his leg. Lucinda corrects her: it's "The Cook's Tale," not "The Reeve's Tale," and it's not a boil. Pauline insists she is right. Lucinda recites a line: “Greet harm was it, as it thoughte me, / That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.” She says a "mormal" was an abscess, a sore that would not heal. Pauline insists Lucinda is wrong and mocks her, saying since she works in a bookstore at least she's around books a lot. Scott is amazed at how accurately she pronounces the Middle English words. Later on, a colleague says he has seen Lucinda somewhere but can't quite recall where.

Charles Dickens

Soon Pauline gets a lesion on her face. It won't heal, spreads, and she dies of infection. Another hostile colleague begins to gain weight so much that before the tenure hearing he is confined to a wheelchair. His obesity necessitates knee surgery. With two hostile colleagues gone, Scott sails through his tenure hearing. Lucinda also begins giving him to books. He reads, they talk about the books, which gets her sexually excited, and they make love. When he fails to finish a book on time, she gets cross and says she will see him when he gets it read.

Soon, too, his friend Mike says he has figured out where he saw Lucinda before and shows Scott a photograph of several Victorian writer's, including Charles Dickens. Behind him, smiling, hands on his shoulders, is a woman who looks like Lucinda's twin. He thinks it must be an ancestor; she is wearing a large onyx ring Lucinda wears, but he knows it could be a family heirloom passed down to her.

After he tells Lucinda, they talk books and go to bed, as usual. He has noticed that their lovemaking often follows the contours to what they have read. Tonight they read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a violent and rather grim text. Their embrace is violence and dark. When he turns to face her after post-coital dozing, she tells him she is indeed the women in the photo, has lived a long life, and stays alive by means of books she had lovers read to her. He dismisses it as psychosis, but she proves her statement to him in a most unpleasant fashion:

The dim light around her quivered and she in a dark flash she changed. Her skin became green, her eyes feline and red, mouth fanged, fingers claws, hair writhing like snakes.  He tried to get up, but her arms held him down with superhuman strength. Fire flashed from her eyes and her tongue, cloven like a snake’s, shot out at him and left a track of foul-tasting slime from his chin to his nose. He tried to scream but fear had paralyzed him so he could not make a sound. 

Then she was herself again.

 Since he doesn't seem quite convinced, she then transforms into a blob-like, slimy creature was oily pink skin, a shapeless mouth, and tentacles. Scott is convinced. She is succubus who thrives not off of sex but off of reading. He has become her captive. He dares not disobey her. She tells him she has had lots of men in her care:  Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and others. And, she reminds him, she eliminated the two colleagues who threatened his tenure. He needs to be thankful. She tells him, "I am your friend and lover, Scott.  Don’t be afraid of me.  You don’t need to be—as long as you keep reading.”

She leaves. Stunned, shaken, Scott begins the book she has left him to read:  Bag of Bones by Stephen King. It is 800 pages long. But he has no choice. He begins reading as dawn breaks over the horizon.

I don't like writing dark horror. I don't like to see the monsters win. But, it is a good exercise. You have to know how write in all sorts of genres. And the market for this sort of horror is good. Negative capability enables one to see many facets of a matter without necessarily being committed to one. So it is with me and dark horror.

For titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Daemons, possession, the occult? Look at The Prophetess. Horror from the New Testament! Really!

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer, #8: The Ghost of Christmas Present, or Taking Ideas from Famous Stories

After I published five stories in a row about my ongoing character, musician Sossity Chandler, I decided I needed to do something else. Ongoing characters are common. W. Somerset Maugham wrote several stories about Ashendon, a British spy. Not many people know that Mark Twain wrote two novels about Tom Sawyer after the publication of the initial book on him. Other authors have done the same, but I thought maybe I ought to branch out a little bit lest I get caught in a rut.

The Christmas holidays were approaching. Christmas is many things, but to those who read a lot it is also Dickens' famous novella, A Christmas Carol. Soon I had an idea for a new story.

Doing a spin-off story was nothing new for me. I said in an earlier blog that the first story I published, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake," was modeled on a Henry James story, "The Aspern Papers." But this would be a little different. It would reference a well-known piece of literature. It would continue the creative "conversation" on the piece. I had seen some spins on the story. The made-for-TV movie An American Christmas Carol set the story in the USA during the Great Depression. Everyone from Mickey Mouse to Mr. Magoo to the Muppets had been included in versions of the story. This story, however, would employ elements from the Dickens ghost tale and go off in a different direction from the original.

Doing this sort of thing is an old tradition. I often 

hear people talking about how Shakespeare "stole" all his plot lines from other authors. I once heard a poet tell about how William Wordsworth "stole" the idea for the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" from his sister, Dorothy.  But the idea that every story must be original is a relatively new development. In the past, authors took elements from other stories, used plots, tropes, characters, and ideas freely. And even modern writers do. My favorite story, W. Somerset Maugham's "Mr. Know-All," borrows plot from "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. Examples could be multiplied. But if you're going to communicate with an existing 

work of literature (I like this term better than "steal"), 

you'd better do it with a little bit of skill.

The story, "The Ghost of Christmas Present," appeared in a British magazine called Neonbeam (no longer published). It is about a lonely, down-and-out guy, Jerry, who receives a visitor on Christmas night. The young lady says she has no place to go. He assumes she is homeless. She is dressed retro (1960s) and doesn't know what a computer or bottled water is. Finally, she confesses that she is a ghost.

He looks up her story and finds out she was murdered after a rock concert some time back. Once it is established she is a ghosts, she quips, "I guess I could be the Ghost of Christmas Present."  He remembers how as a child he had thought this meant "present" as in "gift" and that the ghost brought people Christmas presents. Jerry goes to bed that night thinking he can't even score with a ghost girl and this Christmas will be like the others in his adult life:  lonely and disappointing. In the middle of the night, however, the girl materializes in his bed. She informs him that from midnight to about 3 a.m., ghosts have bodies and the two of them make love. She also tells him why she is a ghost. Pretty and sought-after in life, she led many young men on. One ended up committing suicide after she dumped him and, when she is later murdered, she can't go to her rest. Being with Jerry makes her realize that to "go on" she will have to do good. The good is showing him love, giving of herself, and then being willing to face the consequences (whatever they are) when she goes on to her reward.

Shakespeare also informs the story. She haunted the theater where the concert after which she was murdered was held. But when a church rented the place for a Christmas celebration, she was driven out and had to flee. At the beginning of Hamlet, when Horatio and his friends are speculating on whether or not they've really seen a ghost, one comments,

                                       Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
                                    Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
                                    The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
                                    And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
                                    The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
                                    No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
                                    So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Something about Christmas and ghosts doesn't jive. So the girl, whose name is Bari, is driven away and has to seek refuge in Jerry's house. Here is another instance of "stealing." But for writers, using other texts is par for the course.

Bari is able to go on—though she's not sure 

what awaits her later in the afterlife—because 

she has done good and shown love to someone. In the morning, Jerry gets a call from the only girl he ever dated inviting him to spend Christmas day with her. The Ghost of Christmas Present has indeed brought him a gift—the gift he wanted most of all.

Stories that reference familiar works of literature are risky. The author has to walk a fine line, not borrowing too much from the story, not crassly appropriating another author's content, but making, in a sense, a commentary on the possibilities an existing story opens up. "All books speaks of other books, and every author tells a story that has already been told," novelist and critic Umberto Eco once wrote. Stories have already been told, but they lead to innumerable tales that can proceed from the original. "The Ghost of Christmas Present" was like this. There have been other "takes" in my writing career. Appropriating ideas from well-known literary works, revising them, and recasting them is a great exercise for any writer to do.

Take a look at my newest book, Mother Hulda, a science fiction story based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm. 

Check out my Writer's Page for more titles. 

Comments are always welcome!