THE REVIEWS

• "Hyperventilating noxious stew" - Los Angeles Times
• "Fascinating addition to the canon" - Jack the Ripper And Me
• "Better than 90% of the suspect books ever written" - Casebook Forums
• "Scintillating new theory... add Walter the pornographer to the list of Ripper candidates" - Katherine Ramsland
• "You'll have to have a strong stomach to read" - Huntington News
• "A revealing, chilling and shocking insight" - North West Newspapers
• "The secret hero of the book is W.T. Stead" - Star News
• "A tremendous piece of research" - JTRFORUMS.COM

BLOGGED: My Secret Knife

A Review of Jack the Ripper's Secret Confession posted to Pessimystic by blogger Tom Cole

And so we turn to Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession, a book in which David Monaghan and Nigel Cawthorne claim that the man who made whoring in the East End decidedly dangerous was none other than ‘Walter’, the author of the infamous (and voluminous) Victorian erotic memoir, My Secret Life.

Jack the Ripper’s Secret Confession is quite the page-turner. The authors quote liberally from the more lurid episodes in My Secret Life, which are as shocking (and consequently entertaining) as you might imagine, as well as from reports into the underworld of 1890s London, and spare no detail in describing the Ripper murders. The book revealed to me a wodge of facts about the case and Victorian society at the turn of the 20th century of which I was previously unaware. The writers’ tactic of alternating chapters which focus heavily on the facts of the Ripper murders with others focusing intently on My Secret Life is effective and makes the book seem pacy and urgent.

While this book won’t tell you who the Ripper is (nor indeed will it firmly settle on the authorship of My Secret Life for that matter), it will entertain and engage you ‘til its end. Even approached with as sceptical a set of prior assumptions as my own, the book is an entertaining summary of the agreed facts around Jack the Ripper, a whistle-stop tour of late-Victorian London and an engaging discussion about one of English literature’s most hotly debated and notorious works, all of which are assets of the work to be commended. Well worth a read.