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.
