My opinion on my novel

I was asked by the 'Ripperologist' bimonthly magazine's fiction reviewer, David Green, what I thought about my book not as a writer, but as a reader.  He had read my book and had already writen a review to appear in December's edition of the magazine. I had no idea what he would say although I had a few hints. This is what I told him:

It's hard to distance oneself as a reader from a book I wrote. Nevertheless, I'll try to tell you what I like about it.

We have to go back to the first draft which was written in the third person point-of-view. The story was totally different. Woodrow Wilson was the Ripper and Gordon Fiztgerald became aware of it after having observed him in a pub looking at other women in a very strange and disturbing manner. From the moment he addresses him with these words, “I know who you are”, a growing complicity builds up between both of them. The problem I had with the plot, although it seemed appealing was one could figure out the outcome.

The second draft is basically the story we have in the final version, but still written in the third person. I wasn't satisfied with most of the sub-plots, not that they weren't interesting, but they did not allow me to focus enough on what was going through Riley's mind. Using the first-person point of view gave me that possibility and presenting the story as a diary made it easier. It would also allow for the reader a more personal connection with the main character. Those are the reasons behind the third draft which, by the same token, gave me the opportunity to add a romantic touch by including Elizabeth. So this is one of the things I like about the book, the use of the first-person POV.

The problem, however, I had with this diary format was that I had to find a way to deliver it. It's not like the diary of Anne Frank'or Maybrick's diary. It couldn't just pop out of nowhere. Someone had to have found it, hence the prologue and the epilogue. Why not going a little further along the thin fiction/reality line and tell the reader I was the one who found the diary. Epilogues often create a questionable delay preventing the reader from entering quickly into the story. They are used as an introductory setup of the story in terms of location and period. To avoid this problem, I decided to create a story around the story and have the reader jump into it directly with what I consider to be a rather good opening hook: “Prepare to drop the anchor”.

Of course, one aspect I gave a priority to was working on a JTR story which would not be the story of a police officer chasing the Ripper, nor a JTR pursuit through time. I wanted to tell a story about someone who lived in the district and had nothing to do with the Ripper turn into a man hunter. It's funny to see that a story that began in the first draft with someone befriending Jack the Ripper turned into a story about someone who ran away from his home when he was a young boy and hid himself from his past by working with corpses only to find himself hunting the Ripper. Globally speaking, I tend to believe the story is more than a Jack the Ripper pursuit and offers an interesting blend of brutal reality, drama and wit.

Another thing I like about the book is having tried to integrate, in the dialogues, as much descriptive elements as possible, breaking them down into small fragments. Too often, novels provide the author with the chance to show how well they can write descriptions or narrative parts. Of course, it does, but sometimes it slows down the pace at the wrong moment. You'll find an example on pages 204-205.

Building characters was probably the most demanding task I went through. However, it's also the most fascinating one. It's like writing a short biography for each one of the main characters. I must say that Luigi Pirandello's play, 'Six Characters In Search of an Author' showed me how important character creation is. Once it's done, all the writer has to do is offer them a scene within his story and they'll do the rest. I believe I gave them strong personalities. Considering the fact that in most stories, the hero wins (and has to be an American!!!), something I hate, Woodrow Riley had to be an anti-hero. In the case of those who existed, Abberline, Le Grand, Lusk, etc., I preserved what we knew about them seeking coherence before anything else when I used them. I like what I did with Le Grand, turning him into Riley's quipping partner. I wanted to avoid the kind of characters we find in movies such as In Hell where Abberline is presented as someone in complete contradiction with the person he really was.

There's also all the historical research the story required of me. Buying period maps, subscribing to archives. I even bought a 1888 Bradshaw railway guide just to get the exact departure time from the Euston train station when Riley leaves London to go to Manchester. All this doesn't make a story, but I enjoyed discovering details that became part of it such as the November 10 event where Riley almost gets lynched (p 351). It was based on an insignificant event that actually occurred on that day in Spitalfields. It was metionned on page 5 of London's Daily News, November 10, 1888 edition.

As for the things I like less, I'll mention the extended use of inquiry descriptions of the victims, although one cannot imagine a JTR story without blood and gut cutting. Maybe I should have edited them more. However, the aspect worrying me the most is this feeling I still have about the end of the story. It may seem I crashed landed the end. But then, there was no need for fast paced loaded action. Riley was crossing the ocean, wounded, sick almost dying and still trying to get a hold on Tumblety. In my mind, the main character had to be an anti-hero til the end. Even if he had caught Tumblety, he would have learned he wasn't the Ripper something everybody had already told him. Then what? So I made him prefer surviving, something we don't know if he actually did.

 He didn't consider the way I handled the end the same way I did and told me how he felt about it:

My view is that the ending works very well indeed. Sometimes these kind of shocking, dramatic revelations in the last paragraph can come across as a little contrived and stage-managed - but I didn't feel this was the case with My Ripper Hunting Days. Besides, there are hints in the novel that the astute reader will already have picked up on (i.e. on page 298 where we learn that Riley's father killed his wife in a Ripper-style manner; and on page 384 he says "You're my..." just before he dies).
When the magazine was realesed on December 24, I didn't expect such a positive review. This is what he wrote:

Woodrow Riley is a highly unusual young Irishman. He works as a laboratory assistant at the London Hospital preparing bodies for dissection. He seems a rather creepy figure at first, more at home among the dead than the living, until a chance encounter with Francis Tumblety propels his life in a new direction.

Tumblety’s elaborate scheme is to harvest the reproductive organs of deceased prostitutes and have Riley preserve them using the facilities at the Hospital. To that end Riley supplies Tumblety with a black bag containing amputation knives. But then the mutilated bodies of women start turning up in Whitechapel… Riley sets out to hunt down the man he believes has committed murder; but he also embarks on a journey of self-discovery, delving into his own past and uncovering uncomfortable personal truths.

The novel is presented in diary format, which poses conundrums for the reader: is it a reliable and comprehensive document? Does it set out to deflect suspicion from Riley by manipulating the evidence in his favour? Tumblety may be a credible Ripper suspect, but what exactly is his relationship with Riley? Is the younger man being drawn unwittingly into the role of an accomplice? Nothing is quite what it seems and the astute reader soon learns to mistrust what the narrator is telling us (at least part of the time). Characters dissemble and utter untruths; they adopt disguises or assume false identities. Innocent conversations turn out to be tip-offs or confessions.

Several subplots offer counterpoint to Riley’s hunt for the Ripper. Early on, he falls under the influence of Gordon Fitzgerald, a wealthy philanthropist from Dublin, who has his own agenda. And it is with Fitzgerald’s daughter Elizabeth that Woodrow seeks to resettle destitute East End families in Quebec. Meanwhile, Inspector Abberline and Sergeant Thick are taking a close interest in Riley’s Ripper hunting activities, yet both officers seem preoccupied with an earlier ongoing investigation into Irish Nationalism and Fenianism.

My Ripper Hunting Days can be enjoyed simply as an historical murder mystery, but I suspect Bernard Boley’s true intentions lie elsewhere. He has written a picaresque drama about courage and personal responsibility and the consequences of family legacy. Its theme is not only how individual lives may be shaped by the course of history but how history itself is shaped by the actions of individuals. Ambitiously, several of the novel’s most important characters are kept on the periphery of the tale, and the Jack the Ripper murders are illuminated largely by subordinating them to the unfolding of Riley’s individual destiny. These are risky literary manoeuvers, but the author pulls them off magnificently.

This is a thoughtful, skillfully plotted and fascinating work that shines with intelligence.

I

I'm now on Goodreads author section

The thing I like about this profile page of mine is that they offer a series of questions for the author to respond. I would like to share them with you:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Experiencing the writer's block is normal. It happened to me quite a few times. I don't fight it. I simply pause for a while, do some research on the main topic of whatever I'm working on, on scenes, characters. I tend to go back to the beginning, looking for better words and sentences, questioning the relevance of parts.
In other words, I stay inside this gigantic bubble every writing project has blown around me and move in a different direction. It became a sort of Zen thing for me and doesn't cause me any stress.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

You have this immense feeling of power in creating an imaginary world built upon what you see, think, smell, touch, hear everyday and putting it inside various characters who suddenly come alive asking you, almost begging you to do something with them. If you ever had the chance to see Luigi Pirandello's play, 'Six Characters In Search of an Author', you would understand what I'm trying to say.
It's also amazingly humbling to experience how much writing brings you beyond what you may have thought you were and could become.

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Putting aside the genre I prefer, historical novels, the two most important questions one must keep asking himself as he's writing are:
1. What's the point I'm trying to make in this portion of dialogue or narrative?
2. Is it bringing the story forward?

What are you currently working on?

I got three other book projects on the back burner and once the promotion/marketing on my first novel will be completed. I'll move on to the next one.

How do you get inspired to write?

I've been writing almost all my life, always carrying a pencil and notepad. I would write down what I felt as well as what I believed others were feeling based on their body language. Odors, colors were part of the elements I would write. I would also take pictures of scenes and gave myself these sort of 'Now describe it to me' homeworks.

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

The core of the story came from a dream I kept having for weeks. I told myself that writing it down would help, and it did. However, I never expected it would turn into a book project even less a Jack the Ripper historical fiction.
I went through three complete rewrites including a change of POV with some seven or eight variations in the last one before I was completely satisfied.

Here's the link: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16052102.Bernard_Boley

This is the content of the press release I began sending about my book:

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bernard Boley announces his first novel, 'My Ripper Hunting Days'
A powerful and mind-blowing historical drama fiction about Jack The Ripper

Merida, Yucatan, October 6, 2016: After many years spent writing his novel in the United States, Canada and Mexico, Bernard Boley's first novel is now available on Amazon under the title 'My Ripper Hunting Days'. It's offered in e-book and 5X8 paperback versions.

The story not only involves an actual prime Ripper suspect, the American named Francis Tumblety, but also other well known persons back then such as Scotland Yard's Inspector Frederick Abberline, Whitechapel H-Division, Sergeant William Thick, Vigilante Committee's president, George Lusk, and a crook named Le Grand. All reveal themselves exactly as historical data has presented them, but it's as if the author knew them personally.

The story revolves around a diary found in Canada where its author, Woodrow Reily, writes down his pursuit of the Ripper. If you have enjoyed Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express', where Hercule Poirot resolves the crime in the last minutes, prepare yourself for an even more thrilling and mind-blowing ending by reading 'My Ripper Hunting Days'.

Writing my novel

Why the Ripper?

One of the first questions one might ask me is why I decided to write a Jack the Ripper novel. It all began as a dream I kept having for weeks. No! I wasn't dreaming about Jack the Ripper even less a JTR novel. In this repeating nocturnal fantasy I had, there was a man sitting in a bar. He was observing women around him, observing each one carefully, avoiding eye contact and writing down notes. A voice from somewhere else in the bar, probably coming from another table, was addressing him with these words: “I know what you're doing: stalking.”

I couldn't get rid of this dream up until I told myself I should write down something about it. A novel was the avenue I decided upon. A story involving stalking? Not that exciting. How about a stalking-serial killer? Great. Now all I had to do is selecting among the hundreds of serial killers the one who would carry my nightmare. You can easily imagine the task of going through the major serial killer books. I won't even share with you what it could have demanded of me.

 

Eventually, I fell upon Jack the Ripper and was sort of discouraged by the number of fiction opportunities he had offered writers for decades. I, nevertheless, decided to work with the Ripper case, mainly because it happened during the late Victorian era, a period I just can't get enough of. The British accent, the wit of the Englishmen, the architecture, the class conflicts, the lifestyles are only a few elements I enjoy. As for the Ripper, I think the only storyline not covered has been Jack verus Goldorak or the Terminator, so I had to come up with something new. That's when Jack London's The People of the Abyss fell on me like Newton's apple. It influenced me probably more than any other late-Victorian-early-20th story. I wanted the reader to live the life of the street people at the time of the murders. What was going on in the mind of the people living in the East End back then became the main factor for me to build this story about an ordinary person, not a copper, trying to find the Ripper.

You went through three rewrites?

Yes. The first writing brought me in a long narrow dead-end storyline which I won't describe just in case I find a way through and write a different story. It was done with a third-person point of view (POV), the most common writing technique found. It had a rather small set of subplots most of them leading me nowhere. So in the second writing, I dropped the subplots and switched to the first-person point of view. The same thing happened, a dead-end, even if I honestly felt I had a well framed storyline. The third writing was a total rewrite, the only element I kept was the Jack the Ripper background and the presence of someone observing another person reading in a crowded pub. My nightmare stalker disappeared and became the main character, Riley, an initially introverted and reluctant Ripper hunter who quickly turns it into an obsession. Fearing he might die, he decided to write down his story on an almost day-by-day basis making it a diary someone finds decades later. It's the third and last writing.

Why a first-person POV?

I believed it offered me an easier way to keep the intrigue within a limited range of situations, and allowed the main character to express his true emotions and not those perceived by the other characters the 'narrator' would introduce. Subplots within a third-person POV novel probably allow the author a better ground for that purpose than a first-person POV. I tend to believe that it all depends on how one wants to handle the conflicts a novel carries between the antagonist and the protagonist. In 'My Ripper Hunting Days' it's a more inner conflict than one opposing the main character and other characters. The combination of a first-person POV, the story's frame, a diary, and the provenance of the character writing his diary, Woodrow Riley, created certain constraints in terms of wording. In the third-person POV, most of the time, the narrator uses a wording different from the language each and every one of his character uses. The writer will often describe a setting or a character in a more flamboyant pure traditional literature style than simple everyday words. It turned into one of the biggest challenges I had with this kind of format: using the appropriate wording. Since it's the 'diary' of a self-made young man, I wrote the narrative sections in the same kind of language he would have used every day in his life. It's not necessarily the kind one would find in a third-person POV.

Did I have an idea of what I was about to go through?

Not at all! The challenge was tremendous, historical research being one major element. Police archives were either lost, destroyed or inaccessible. I had to rely upon the works of the great ripperologists who had done a fascinating research job either in books, archives or on two major forums, Casebook and JTR forums. Newspaper archives completed the basis of my prime source documentation. I also bought some documentation sources on the Internet. For example, in the novel, my main character had to go to Manchester. From what train station and at what time would he leave? The answer came from a vintage edition of Bradshaw's Railway Guide I bought on the net. However, besides the actual facts surrounding Jack the Ripper I had to learn almost by heart a whole lot of period elements. Let me give you a funny example of a situation I went through. My main character is invited for dinner, and I decided to have his host serve him a Vichyssoise soup which is a cold soup made of puréed leeks, onions, potatoes, cream, and chicken stock only to find out its original preparation dated somewhere around 1917! So I had to serve them something different.

Since the story happens in the end of the 19th century in UK, I read a lot of Ripper period novels just to get into writing correct structure and vocabulary. The structure of the British sentence is a bit different from the North American one. So is the extended use of adverbs versus adjectives, allowing the typical British character to keep a certain distance, adjectives being considered as an emotional response. The vocabulary and the spelling of many words had to be the kind used back then.

Is building a character playing God?

Almost, although, it took me more than seven days. For me, a good character is not only someone you set in a scene. He's a virtual human being with a past, a lifestyle, a way he behaves, talks, dresses. From the moment you begin to use him, the reader should be able to see him in his mind like the same way the writer did when he created him. So creating a character, is something that one has to seriously work on once a broad storyline is built.

We will often hear authors talking about invasive characters imposing their presence within every chapter of a storyline, directly or indirectly. I must admit I've always been aware of this possibility since I saw Luigi Pirandello's play 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' some thirty years ago. It's about a director and actors rehearsing a play and suddenly who are interrupted by six bizarre persons appearing on the stage and searching for an author to finish the story they all have been involved in. As the play develops, these persons explain it to the director and actors who decide to build something around it. They actually take control of everything that follows. Well, the same thing happened to me. As I would sketch out a chapter or a scene using some of my characters, I would often lose control of what I wanted to write because each character, given his personality, had something he could say or do, and surprisingly, I would find myself working in that direction.

What about rhythm and pace?

Of course, maintaining a good pace was also important to me, and I still consider some paragraphs in my novel could be deleted. 
 

I seem to have detected a rather recent tendency in fiction book writing. Let's say, dating no more than 10-15 years ago. It's strongly influenced by action movies, either plot or character-driven plots. In a movie, a scene lasts a few minutes where you will find a beginning, a climax and an end delivered through the setting, the dialog or the action. The narrative portion is becoming minimal if not totally absent. Narrative descriptions are integrated through the eyes of the characters or within the dialog which allows a continuous pace. If one reads Dan Brown's novels and watches the movies, he sees how the screenplay preserved this kind of writing. 

I could talk about many other aspects of novel writing, but I'll keep for an other article. 

A powerful and mind-blowing historical drama fiction!

After many years spent writing my novel in the United States, Canada and Mexico, my first novel is now available on Amazon under the title 'My Ripper Hunting Days'. It's offered in e-book and 5X8 paperback versions.

The story not only involves an actual prime Ripper suspect, the American named Francis Tumblety, but also other well known persons back then such as Scotland Yard's Inspector Frederick Abberline, Whitechapel H-Division, Sergeant William Thick, Vigilante Committee's president, George Lusk, and a crook named Le Grand. All reveal themselves exactly as historical data has presented them, but it's as if I knew them personally.

The story revolves around a diary found in Canada where its author, Woodrow Reily, writes down his pursuit of the Ripper. If you have enjoyed Agatha Christie's 'Murder on the Orient Express', where Hercule Poirot resolves the crime in the last minutes, prepare yourself for an even more thrilling and mind-blowing ending by reading 'My Ripper Hunting Days'.

You can share your comments here or on my Amazon author page

'My Ripper hunting days', a Jack the Ripper novel I wrote

I've just finished writing my first novel which, I hope, will be published soon. It's titled 'My Ripper Hunting days'. Of course, we're talking about Jack the Ripper who viciously murdered five women in the eastern side of London in 1889. The East End was where the poor and miserable lived. Families would often live in a single room. The Ripper was a cleaver and well organized serial killer.

I've been working on this novel for years, and it required a lot of research to make sure references to streets, clothes, for example, were not only relevant, but historically correct.

The story goes a bit like this: When I was 14-15 years old, I found a well-preserved diary of a young man, Woodrow Reily, who worked at the London Hospital and was held at the Grosse-Isle quarantine station near Quebec City having caught typhus while crossing the Atlantic. He wrote how he met a man named Francis Tumblety, an actual Jack the Ripper suspect, and befriended him, but soon after becomes convinced this man is Jack the Ripper. The more evidence he gathers, the more he believes the East End murders may only be pieces of a larger puzzle in which Tumblety seems to be playing an important part. Will he get the whole picture and capture Tumblety the Ripper? Was he really hunting Tumblety, the Ripper or someone from his past, a dark past he even denies having gone through? You shall find out once you grab a copy of Reily's soon to be published diary, 'My Ripper Hunting days'.

Of course, I never found such a diary, but someone had to find it. So why not me? Then again, maybe I did actually find his diary. Anyway, I'll let you speculate. The story not only involves Francis Tumblety but also a couple of other well known persons such as Scotland Yard's Inspector Frederick Abberline, Whitechapel H-Division Sergeant William Thick, Vigilante Committee George Lusk and a well known crook named Le Grand. All reveal themselves a bit differently than we what we knew of them, and are often witty as Brits tend to be.

 The main character, Woodrow Reily had nothing to do with the Ripper case preferring one-way conversations between him and dead bodies of the pathological laboratory where he worked because "They don't talk back". Nevertheless, this ordinary and somewhat introverted guy pursues someone he believes is the Ripper and gets into a lot of trouble.

The difference in this story, compared to other JTR novels, is that we're not talking about police chasing the Ripper such as Allan Moore's 'In Hell' nor is it like Sphen Hunter's 'I, Ripper' where a journalist and the Ripper keep stalking each other. It's not a time-traveller Ripper story nor is it a Jack The Ripper against the Terminator kind of book.

I'll be back to share with you many aspects in this novel-writing experience of mine.