was given this book for an Xmas present in 2002, but didn't get around to reading it for over a year. Once I did, I enjoyed it, and then gained much more enjoyment from reading the criticisms of it by other Ripperologists, who think little of Cornwall's ideas, despise and envy her methods, and are consumed with jealousy over her discoveries, resources and the size of her reading audience. Factor all of that in when you read their arguments against her startling and finger-pointing conclusions.

And yes, this is her book about who Jack the Ripper was, and why she is convinced that she has at last solved the unsolved mystery. She names names, she does extensive research, and she builds a compelling case.

I'm not quite sure how to review this book, since my usual categorized review style doesn't translate that well from fiction to non-fiction. The concept and real life characters in Cornwall's book are the strengths of it, especially when she goes into the mind of the killer or describes the times in fictional style. Her analytical, factual writing is much weaker, and I think the book's order and style of presentation could have been much stronger with some editing, especially on the chronology of things. It's obvious she's made some concessions to the mass market and chosen to present the material in entertaining fashion, rather than sticking purely to the investigative reporter non-fiction technique. While I understand her motives, I can't ignore the fact that it makes the book material a bit scattered 

Portrait of a Killer, Patricia Cornwall. The full title is a bit presumptuous, not to mention long. Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper -- Case Closed. In the book, suspense writer Patricia Cornwall investigates the famous Jack the Ripper homicides, considers multiple suspects, and soon names one; a famous painter, Walter Sickert.  She spends the rest of the book pressing her case with a lot of circumstantial evidence, criminal profiling, and some original detective work that's pretty impressive.  Whether or not the information she gathers would be enough to win a conviction in court is open to debate, but there's certainly enough there to make for an interesting read.

I've had the book since it was first released, but hadn't read it until just a couple of weeks ago, in late January 2004. The book was a gift that I received for Christmas in 2002, over a year ago, from a website coworker.  I hadn't asked for it, but the friend who sent it to me lives in the UK, and knows of my serial killer interest, so it was a good choice for a gift.  I was interested in it, but never seemed to get around to reading it until I was prompted by events that transpired during the endless wait to eat at Claim Jumper on Valentine's Day.  While we waited 3 hours for a table, Malaya and I spent about an hour and a half browsing a discount book outlet, and to fill the time I read a chapter or two out of about a dozen novels.  One that I selected, basically at random, was a non-fiction book by an ex-FBI pathologist and criminal profiler.  And in one chapter of his book, he discussed Jack the Ripper, and his work in creating a criminal profile of the man as part of a UK TV special.  He didn't come to any definite conclusions, but out of the few choices, he favored Kosminski, a Polish Jew who lived in the Whitechapel area.

Spurred on by reading that short account of the issue, I started on Cornwall's book the next day, and read through it in a couple of days.  It's a fast read, as I said.  She's not a brilliant writer, by any means, but she's entirely competent in writing non-fiction, and has some flair for fiction. She puts it to good use in Portrait, since the recreations and descriptions of the various murders are by far the best part, since she can write them basically as fiction. Fiction based on real events. The background information about the victims, including their generally miserable lives, their life stories, the social situation and setting of the times, information about the Whitechapel area, the police at the time, society in general, and the actual technique of the killings and how they were discovered and investigated are all fascinating.

Cornwall is less skilled at putting together a coherent and chronological book, but I think most of that was due to her writing it for a general audience, and editing it to keep interest throughout.  The best chapters are the five that feature long, detailed descriptions of the victims, their final day on earth, the crime itself, and the immediate aftermath and pathetic, utterly hopeless police investigations into the Ripper crimes.  Spaced around these she's got tons of psychoanalysis and profiling of her anointed Ripper suspect, reports of her own investigation into the issue, new discoveries, and far more on the technical details of police procedure, both back then and now.

The book isn't written like a non-fiction book meant solely to advance her theory and build to a conclusion.  It does that, but it's also meant to be popularly accessible and interesting, so she spaces out the juicy stuff to keep from having too many pages of dry procedural facts in a row, and jumps around a lot, in how she relates her own investigation, how she talks about past Ripper study, and also the chronology of the olden times and the bloody crimes.  It's written as though either 1) she put it all down without any editing or proofreading at all, throwing things in in any order as she thought of them while writing, or 2) carefully edited into that form, in order to be interesting to the layman and varied in tone and content. It's like one of those perfectly artful, messy hairstyles that Meg Ryan used to wear in every movie. Where you can't tell she spent two hours to get it perfectly "just rolled out of bed" or if they really did just roll out of bed.

I think Cornwall's case could be presented more coherently and lucidly and it would be more persuasive. But it would make the overall book less enjoyable a read, especially for the general audience. She obviously balanced it how she thought best, and what the best seller crowd likes is not going to be what the hardcore Ripperologist wants. Not that they were likely to greet her conclusions with much enthusiasm anyway, no matter how she presented them, given her pedigree and financial advantage.  And when she called her book Case Closed, seemingly dismissing and denigrating the years of work the Ripperologists had put in, that was probably the end of it, in terms of winning over the geek Ripper crowd. More on that issue later.

Another thing she did very well was to discuss the police at the time.  Who they were, who was in charge, what their jobs were (basically walking around the dark blocks of the slum areas to keep some semblance of order; solving crimes was not exactly a top priority, even if they'd had any ability to do so in anything other than the most obvious of cases), what tools they had available, and so on.  Cornwall frequently lists the myriad of errors they made in their investigation (it's a good thing they didn't arrest anyone as the Ripper, since they'd certainly have gotten the wrong man) though she's not entirely unsympathetic.  As she says, the Ripper was a criminal a century before his time; killing quickly and anonymously, selecting strangers who had no ties to him, and leaving virtually no evidence behind. Today he'd be caught in a week, with the ability to take fingerprints off of dead bodies, gather DNA samples, fingerprint and analyze letters he mailed, and so on. But in the late 1800s, before such police procedures existed, he was untouchable.

Since the presentation is pretty sound, aside from some editing and presentation choices that clearly favored popular readership over scholarship, valid criticism of the book must them focus on Cornwall's methods and conclusions, rather than her presentation. And while I think a lot/most of the critics are fueled by jealousy and bitterness and indignation, that doesn't mean what they have to say is necessarily wrong.

Some good, if rather brief discussion of Cornwall's man, the famous painter Walter Sickert, and a good sampling of the general critical reaction to her book can be found in an updated chapter on the Crime Library discussion of Jack the Ripper. A quote:

Retired police officer Stewart Evans, now a crime historian and author of four Ripper books, dismissed Ms. Cornwell's theory as "nonsense, devoid of any evidence whatsoever." The British newspaper {The Guardian} reported on December 8, 2001 that:

“The American crime novelist Patricia Cornwell was accused of ‘monstrous stupidity’ for ripping up a canvas to prove that the Victorian painter Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. Even in the context of the crackpot conspiracy theories, elaborate frauds and career-destroying obsessions that London's most grisly whodunnit has spawned, Cornwell's investigation is extreme. Not only did she have one canvas cut up in the vain hope of finding a clue to link Sickert to the murder and mutilation of five prostitutes, she spent £2m buying up 31 more of his paintings, some of his letters and even his writing desk.

My impression, based on reactions like this one and those by some of the negative reviewers on Amazon.com, is that they're geeks who are pissed off at Miss America coming to ruin their party. They've been kicking around the same old tired evidence for decades, getting nowhere with it in their incestuous little circle jerks of self-appointed Ripper experts, everyone up on his own soap box, shouting out his pet theory to no avail. And here comes Mrs. Bestseller with her personal fortune and heavy emphasis on criminal profiling and psychology and deduction, and rather than finding nothing new and bowing to their superior experience, she dared to come up with numerous daring new analyses, found new evidence, and forcefully made a strong claim to have solved the mystery no one else could. Basically, she came into their comic book shop, bought all the best Magic cards, beat them, took their best cards, and laughed while she did it.

It's like Bill Gates storming into some local computer club and showing off his state of the art, prototype Pentium 11 housed in a tower of solid platinum, while all the other geeks are trying to wring an extra 2 FPS from their lovingly-detailed, bargain-purchased, home-assembled computers.  The geeks are either going to line up in worship, or withdraw with much muttering and resentment.  And resentment seems to be the prime reaction, judging by quotes like the one above.  Look at the guy quoted above; he's written not one, not two, but four books on the Ripper. He's probably spent 15 years on the subject. And here comes Cornwall, does work he could never even imagine doing, and she writes a huge bestseller afterwards, spreading her opinion more widely with one book than every other Ripperologist put together, and making her entire investment stake back in royalties.  If I were him, I'd be pissed too.

Stewart Evans does have one Ripper book that's still in print and available from Amazon.com, and I'm sure it's sold a ton of copies, given that there is one whole reader review. Of course just because they're all clearly jealous of Cornwall's resources, fame, and reading audience doesn't mean they're wrong and she's right. But it doesn't mean they're right and she's wrong either.

Curious about the general reader response, I checked Portrait out on Amazon.com, for the reader reviews.  Did anyone comment on it? Oh yes. There are currently 459 Amazon reader reviews yielding a 2.5/5 star rating, and most of the critiques are negative, and quite nit picky. Since the vast majority of books on Amazon have at least 3.5 or 4 stars, a 2.5 is very low, and when you consider that her book is entertaining and a good read on the Ripper subject, you know there's a lot of bitterness and strong disagreement going into those 0 and 1 star reviews.

As for Cornwall's conclusions, her evidence is largely psychological in nature.  According to her, and she's got endless quotes and letter/painting analyses to back it up, Sickert was quite a sick puppy. Apparently mutilated as a child by several traumatic operations to correct a fistula on his penis, he grew up with very fucked up parents, had suspicious episodes of violence in his youth, and just basically fits into the modern "how to raise a serial killer" profile almost perfectly. Since that's the sort of thing Cornwall writes, I think she saw this info, started to fixate on Sickert, and then convinced herself that he was the guy, based on the profile she'd constructed.  And she might be right, though there's no concrete proof, despite her extensive and expensive efforts to find some of his DNA to test.

Sickert was in the seedy Whitechapel area at the time of the Ripper murders, frequently wandered the streets late at night, hung out in very unsavory places and with nasty people, and painted dozens of very creepy paintings showing scenes quite similar to the Ripper killing scenes and victims.  He also seems very likely to be the author of numerous of the letters the Ripper (or hoaxers) sent to various London newspapers at the time, based on various signature quirks, secret initials, letter watermarks, and other such things Cornwall analyzes in great detail.

The best evidence against Sickert being the Ripper is that he was supposedly in France when several of the Ripper murders occurred, and therefore couldn't have possibly committed them. This is pointed out by numerous critics, and not addressed by Cornwall in the book at all, to my memory. I can't believe she didn't hear of this issue while doing her research, so the fact that she doesn't mention it at all troubles me.  She did point out that Sickert was in the habit of popping off to France quite often, and that one could make the trip by train and then steam across the English Channel in just a half a day or so, which might undermine the "He was in France." arguments.  How exact are the dates and times when he was known to be in France? Can anyone prove conclusively that he was in France too soon before or after one of the five credited Ripper murders to make the trip back to Whitechapel to commit it?  If so I've not seen that evidence, so I can't comment on how well it proves or disproves Cornwall's hypothesis.

Perhaps the most interesting detail of the book, something that I'd not heard much about before, is that there were dozens of other murders, similar in nature to the Ripper's, committed in London around that time. For some rather apparently arbitrary reasons, they aren't counted among the official tally. Can anyone prove Sickert's location for those?  Especially since the later ones seem to be frequently announced in advance in those supposedly-hoaxed Ripper letters that Sickert seems such a good suspect for writing.  I've not seen any of Cornwall's critics address those other crimes. She lists numerous mutilations and other blood-thirsty murders, perpetrated upon women and children, and quotes Ripper letters to the newspapers that talk about them, often before they occurred or before they were reported.  She sees this as strong evidence that far more of the Ripper letters are legitimate than the Ripperologists agree upon.

The "experts" agree say that none, or perhaps one, of the hundreds of Ripper letters are legitimately from the killer.  Cornwall says that most of them are legit, and that Sickert wrote almost all of them, continuing long after the first famous dead whores.  She's got lots of evidence that Sickert was amazingly prolific as a writer, and that he sent out dozens a week to numerous publications and newspapers. So he certainly could have written that many letters, taunting the police and the public about his past and future crimes.  But there's no proof that he did, since most of the letters are long gone. Cornwall does show that one of them uses a rather expensive paper with a watermark that matches some Sickert was known to have, but so did many other people.  And in any event, even if she could prove that Sickert wrote that Ripper letter, or even a bunch of them, wouldn't prove that he was the actual killer himself.  He was clearly a weirdo who was fascinated by the crimes, but hell, that describes me as well. He clearly got a joy out of fucking with other people, since he hated the world and considered everyone else inferior to himself. *cough* He could easily have gotten a lot of fun out of fucking with the papers with his letters, while never actually killing anyone himself.

One thing she doesn't discuss much of is why the police at the time and the public and the newspapers didn't associate more of the other murders with the Ripper.  Especially since he was clearly talking about them in his newspaper letters.  I mean the hoax Ripper letters to the papers that (according to Cornwall) told about crimes that he hadn't committed yet.

There's also a very interesting chapter near the end of the book about an inn registry that Cornwall found in some old bed and breakfast in France, one just across the Channel from England.  It's got tons of notes and cruel comments and dirty drawings in the margins, all apparently done by the same person, and there are numerous similarities between those drawings, and the words in the comments, to many of the Ripper letters.  Impersonation? Chance? Or more?  Sickert was known to spend much time at that inn, but there's no way to know if he was the author of the drawings, if he wrote the Ripper letters or just copied their style, if they were true letters, or him just sending off hoaxes to get a thrill.

In any event, I'm not enough of a Ripper expert to draw any conclusions, and I'm certainly not going to trot off and study the letters and figure out the whole chronology and investigate the other crimes to see if they really were foretold in Ripper letters, nor am I interested enough to do a whole lot more reading on the subject. But I found Cornwall's book pretty interesting, if far from completely convincing.  It's certainly good enough for me to recommend it to you guys; if only to give you some perspective on all of the carping and sniping and griping her critics are doing about it.

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