Tags

, ,

Why is the murder of five unknown women in 1888 still interesting? One obvious fact is unusual circumstances make a fabulous detective story It has an abundance of quirky clues that taunt the police, and Ripperologists, and that fact alone narrows the suspect list to a creator of great stories. Since that day hundreds of millions of humans have been killed by other humans, but Jack’s five are the most fascinating. Second obvious fact. Who was the most famous detective strutting around London over the next couple of decades following Jack’s murders. You all know his name, and he was and still is such interesting sleuth that well over a hundred years later he is still a TV mainstay. That lasting fame isn’t an accident; it is the sign of a profoundly good creator of tales.

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional dick, but who was his real life puppet master, the one who created the stories and dialogues? It was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the brilliant creator of multitudes of other mind challenging problems. He loved to charm and hoax the public, and was for a while close friends with Harry Houdini the most famous magician ever. They worked on various schemes together, including spiritualist methods for contacting dead people. Houdini, who was a famous fame seeker himself, said Doyle was the greatest publicist of all time, and that would include himself and PT Barnum.

Among today’s top listings on a Google search [ Jack the Ripper ] was the Huffington Post’s 9 Things You Didn’t Know About Jack The. The short article has 9 photo fly-outs and the first three are directly linked to Conan Doyle. 1st, the Dear Boss letter (written by Doyle); 2nd, Sherlock inspecting the bloody word Rache (the very first word in the Sherlock series); 3rd, a classic profile of Sherlock Holmes (artistic interpretation of Doyle’s Sherlock); 4th, the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson (when dying asked Conan Doyle to finish his incomplete novel), some filler advertisements, 8th, Dracula ad by Bram Stoker (cowritten by Doyle). Why did the Huffington Post article have so much linking to Doyle and nothing about Aaron Kosminski, today’s Ripper suspect?

For more thorough details click Jack the Ripper was Arthur Conan Doyle and click here for a list of my many posts on the Ripper.