Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper
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From the July 1943 issue of WEIRD TALES, this little dark gem has been reprinted more times than the Declaration of Independence. I gave up trying to make a list of anthologies where it could be found. It has also been dramatized on old-time radio many times, including X MINUS ONE, on Bloch's own series STAYED TUNED FOR TERROR and once on an episode of THE KATE SMITH HOUR (?!) in 1944 where Laird Cregar (from THE LODGER fame) starred. Then, of course, it was made into an episode of the extremely wonderful Boris Karloff series THRILLER back in 1961 and it's sometimes listed as an episode of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, although I haven't seen details anywhere.
So this brief chiller has had an amazingly long and popular career, even more remarkable when you consider how disposable pulp magazines were thought to be, read once and thrown away. Who knows, maybe even now some producer is musing by his swimming pool that it's time to dust off this workhorse again.
"Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" is told in the first person by a Chicago psychiatrist named John Carmody, who is dealing with a visitor from the British Embassy, Sir Guy Hollis. Hollis has an obsession with Jack the Ripper that makes Buffy fans look like dabblers. He has spent his entire life and a considerable fortune trying to track down the Ripper, who (he's convinced) is still alive and very much active.
Now, since the known Ripper murders took place back in 1888 and it's now 1943, the idea that Jack is still out there chasing prostitutes with a knife seems to be unlikely. But Hollis has traced a long series of eighty-seven similar murders that have been committed all over the world and he's convinced that Jack was a sorceror who is kept young by black magic, and that these seemingly insane killings are in fact ritual sacrifices. The dark gods appreciate the sacrifices and bestow longevity to the Ripper so that the blood keeps flowing. This gruesome idea makes Jack probably the worst serial killer possible, one that will stay active indefinitely ("an ageless pathological monster, crouching to kill, on evenings when the stars blaze down in the blazing patterns of death.")
In his lifelong pursuit of the fiend, Hollis has studied every theory about the killer's identity and motives, and he hashes them out again while Carmody sneers. Back in 1943, there hadn`t been the same exhaustive amount of research done on the Ripper killings as there has in recent years, and Bloch obviously did some homework for this story.
For a therapist, Carmody seems remarkably rude and unsympathetic. Both in his narration and his remarks to Hollis, he treats the man with open contempt and discouragement. It's not until the very end that we suddenly learn why. Robert Bloch certainly was capable of writing in a variety of approaches (those who remember his Lefty Feep stories will attest to this) but his distinctive style for crime and horror stories was the punchline approach....he basically was telling a twisted joke which built up to a final outrageous sentence which brought the story to a close. The punchline is terific and I admit that when I first read this story around ten or eleven years old, it made my jaw drop open with a thump.
From the July 1943 issue of WEIRD TALES, this little dark gem has been reprinted more times than the Declaration of Independence. I gave up trying to make a list of anthologies where it could be found. It has also been dramatized on old-time radio many times, including X MINUS ONE, on Bloch's own series STAYED TUNED FOR TERROR and once on an episode of THE KATE SMITH HOUR (?!) in 1944 where Laird Cregar (from THE LODGER fame) starred. Then, of course, it was made into an episode of the extremely wonderful Boris Karloff series THRILLER back in 1961 and it's sometimes listed as an episode of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, although I haven't seen details anywhere.
So this brief chiller has had an amazingly long and popular career, even more remarkable when you consider how disposable pulp magazines were thought to be, read once and thrown away. Who knows, maybe even now some producer is musing by his swimming pool that it's time to dust off this workhorse again.
"Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" is told in the first person by a Chicago psychiatrist named John Carmody, who is dealing with a visitor from the British Embassy, Sir Guy Hollis. Hollis has an obsession with Jack the Ripper that makes Buffy fans look like dabblers. He has spent his entire life and a considerable fortune trying to track down the Ripper, who (he's convinced) is still alive and very much active.
Now, since the known Ripper murders took place back in 1888 and it's now 1943, the idea that Jack is still out there chasing prostitutes with a knife seems to be unlikely. But Hollis has traced a long series of eighty-seven similar murders that have been committed all over the world and he's convinced that Jack was a sorceror who is kept young by black magic, and that these seemingly insane killings are in fact ritual sacrifices. The dark gods appreciate the sacrifices and bestow longevity to the Ripper so that the blood keeps flowing. This gruesome idea makes Jack probably the worst serial killer possible, one that will stay active indefinitely ("an ageless pathological monster, crouching to kill, on evenings when the stars blaze down in the blazing patterns of death.")
In his lifelong pursuit of the fiend, Hollis has studied every theory about the killer's identity and motives, and he hashes them out again while Carmody sneers. Back in 1943, there hadn`t been the same exhaustive amount of research done on the Ripper killings as there has in recent years, and Bloch obviously did some homework for this story.
For a therapist, Carmody seems remarkably rude and unsympathetic. Both in his narration and his remarks to Hollis, he treats the man with open contempt and discouragement. It's not until the very end that we suddenly learn why. Robert Bloch certainly was capable of writing in a variety of approaches (those who remember his Lefty Feep stories will attest to this) but his distinctive style for crime and horror stories was the punchline approach....he basically was telling a twisted joke which built up to a final outrageous sentence which brought the story to a close. The punchline is terific and I admit that when I first read this story around ten or eleven years old, it made my jaw drop open with a thump.
statistics: Posted by doctorhermes428 — 6:09 PM - 1 day ago — Replies 3 — Views 268