Title: Ripped
Author: Shelly Dickson Carr
Publisher: New Book Partners
Rating: worthy with reservations!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
I started out liking this although the Cockney nonsense is way overdone. Yeah, Whitechapel is within a mile or so of St Mary Le Bow - the church within the earshot of which you have to be born to be a true Cockney, but let's not run away with ourselves, shall we?! Cockney hasn't always meant what it means today. FYI, St Mary's was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who also designed St Paul's. The chapter titles of the book are based on Oranges and Lemons, an old nursery rhyme the words of which seem to be tied to the sound the various bells supposedly made. But with sixty chapters, there's an insufficiency of verses in that ditty to title them all so the author has to make up a few weird ones to fill the gaps.
The first interesting thing about this novel is that it's purportedly written by Shelly Dickson Carr, but it's copyrighted to Michelle Karol. There's no explanation for this that I can find in the ebook, and there's no information about Carr or Karol on wikipedia. I can only conclude that the author is trying to siphen off some publicity value from her renowned grandfather, John Dickson Carr whose novel The house at Satan's Elbow I reviewed back in July 2013.
My first problem with it arose with the instadore Toby character who was your typically profoundly boring he-teen and the masturbators of the universe type. Seriously, can we not get away from this tedious rubber-stamp male love interest? Apparently not. It would be nice if he turned out to be the villain, but it never looked like that was going to happen. I find it abhorrent that women - especially modern independent women like Katie - are constantly attracted in these novels to men who treat them like dirt of which calling her 'pet' and 'lass' are the least of his infractions. This is an appalling message to send to young women.
Anyway, the novel begins with Katie, an American teen living in London with her grandmother. Her sister is Courtney (as in Courtney Love, but not really) who is in a punk band which is apparently very successful, but this sister can’t be bothered to call her sister, and she plays no part in the story. Katie and Courtney's parents are conveniently dead - a major trope for YA novels. While Katie is getting ready to visit Madame Tussauds waxworks (yes, bad grammar, but that's the way it is!) with Collin (yes with two L's), a cousin, she notices how much the portrait (which her grandmother has conveniently dug out of storage and placed in her room) looks like Courtney. Note that Katie is a history buff - yeah, we get it, time-travel, history buff, going to see the waxworks exhibit of Jack the Ripper, etc etc. Let’s get on with the story instead of reading the Daily Telegraph, shall we?! So off they go to Tussauds where they meet Collin's friend Toby, of course, with his dark eyes, cleft chin, unruly hair, and devilish manner.
Aforementioned issues aside, the story is reasonably well written, and very readable. As long as it didn’t insist upon straying over the line, I could see myself enjoying it, but it all depended on how strong that line was and how good Shelly Dickson Carr/Michelle Karol was at coloring inside it, which promised to be problematical given that Toby inappropriately kept grabbing at Katie as they entered the chamber of horrors, as though she was a worthless weak slip of a girl who needed to be manhandled or she would wilt away and die like a plucked flower. That Katie reacted so limply to his inappropriate behavior gave me little hope that she would turn out to be a decent female protagonist.
I have to say that Madame Tussauds has improved dramatically since I went through it if it’s anything like Karol/Carr describes (although I doubt it actually is anything like Karol/Carr describes!). I was disappointed in the sad, tired, and dusty exhibits, but Karol/Carr has the exhibit featuring lasers and holograms, and narrated by animatronics figures. It's been a long time since I was there, so maybe it improved.
Carr also goes well past the accepted victims of the Ripper (which numbered five), adding three fictional ones. Molly Potter was never a victim: it was Elizabeth Stride who was part of the double murder along with Catherine Eddowes. And no, Eddowes was neither buxom nor a singer by profession, although she did sing to herself apparently, but I prefer George Carlin's version of the 'Tara-raboom-de-eh' (Tara-raboom-de-eh, did you get yours today? I got mine yesterday, that's why I walk this way...!), so Carr was evidently planning on having Katie change history. There are those who argue that Stride was not a Ripper victim, and others who argue that she was, but that the Ripper was interrupted before he could carry out his grisly obsession in full, and that's why Catherine Eddowes was murdered just an hour later. The Ripper's blood lust had not been slaked. The actual last victim was Mary Jane Kelly - and no, she didn’t look like Marilyn Monroe or Anna Nicole Smith, not even close, but Carr has the last victim as Lady Beatrix Twyford, who happens to be the same woman who was in the portrait back in Katie's room at her grandmother's! So yes, an interesting twist, if that's what it is. It reminds me of my own Timeless in some regards.
So there's this exhibit called The London Stone which is fictional (The London Stone actually resides in Cannon Street, but it was once a part of St Swithun's church). The stone has magical powers according to Carr, and of course when Katie touches it, determined to save her distant relative's life, she's transported back to 1888 London, where Collin and Toby also conveniently exist, but their Victorian versions! That was a little too convenient for me, but I decided to give her some rope and see if could anchor this ship or hang herself with it!
So Katie ends up in the Duke's house and Katie overhears him arguing with his granddaughter Lady Beatrix's intended fiancé - except that the Duke of nuke 'em, doesn't intend any such pairing to take place. So conveniently for the plot, he makes a deal with Major Brown that if he gets himself elevated significantly in rank at Scotland Yard, then the cantankerous Duke will give his consent to their marriage, otherwise he leaves Beatrix alone. And of course, Lady Beatrix is indeed the woman in the portrait in Katie’s room.
Katie goes to a play (Jekyll & Hyde) at the Lyceum theater, which happens to be managed by Bram Stoker, who is married to a prior love interest of Oscar Wilde, with whom they travel to the theater. This sounds far fetched, but it is in fact true! Whether Wilde went to see Jekyll & Hyde at the theater I can't say, but he was a friend of Stoker, contrary to the inaccurate and inappropriate way the relationship is portrayed n the novel. Indeed, Stoker visited Wilde in France after his self-imposed exile subsequent to the imprisonment which effectively shattered Wilde and robbed us of his talent.
Also at the theater is actress Lily Langtree, and the Prince of Wales is in attendance as well, but this was after their affair, so there was nothing untoward going on there. However, since Langtree was in the USA in August 1888, it would have been just a bit difficult for her to have been at the Lyceum that night! I have no explanation for why Carr felt such an interfering need to drag historical characters around like this and for no reason at all: none of this contributed to the novel. On the contrary - it distracted from it. James Whistler, for example, became very happily married in 1888, so it's highly unlikely that he'd be hanging out in cheap and nasty London pubs and be haring around London with Oscar Wilde, with whom he'd had an increasing rift since the mid-1880's.
There's also a major (I use that term advisedly!) red herring afloat in trying to implicate Gideon Brown, Beatrix's fiancé, as the Ripper. This is tied to missing opera glasses, the absence of which is completely done to death to the point of being really annoying. I don't know if this is a ham-fisted attempt to implicate him and mislead us, or a ham-fisted attempt to point to the true killer. Brown's motive might have been to generate a series of high profile crimes which he will solve and thereby garner a much-needed promotion for himself, but if that was the case, he failed, because the Ripper's crimes were never solved! I don't buy Brown as the Ripper. I might buy the Duke as such, perhaps not directly, but indirectly, in a desperate attempt to thwart (yes, thwart, I said it!) Brown's ambition for his granddaughter's hand, but even that is weak.
The opera glasses are of interest only for the fact that a set were found by the body of the Ripper's first victim (in this fiction, not irl). That victim was indeed Mary Ann Nichols. The opera glasses were quickly purloined by this guy Cross (whose first name is changed in this novel for reasons as unexplained as they are unnecessary). Carr demonstrates an apparently whimsical bent for altering the details of the Ripper murders and for no reason at all that I can discern. By all means play with history if it benefits your fiction, but random change without any purpose is merely annoying to me. She apologizes for this in an end note title "Notes to the curious" but nowhere in that does she offer a rational accounting of the myriad and gratuitous changes in details, which she misleadingly describes as "changed slightly" and a "bit of factual tinkering". No, they were not! They were changed wholesale, manufactured out of nothing and for no reason. I was set to give this novel a somewhat disapproving 'worthy' once I saw the loose ends being tied off at the end and figured that other readers might take to it a lot more readily than I did, but after reading the notpology "note" I was so annoyed by it that I really wanted to renege on that agreement with myself; however, I shall hold to my promise.
So naturally we wonder about the perp in this story, and there are several possible candidates. I discount Brown, as I've mentioned. There's also something not quite right with the Reverend Pinker who is with the theater party, and while I would like it to be him, I excluded him, too. I still can find no explanation for his meandering through this tale; it would have remained almost exactly the same story had his character been entirely absent from it.
I've also considered that Lady Beatrix herself - a character who is hardly in this story at all - is a potential Ripper, but after all this, my suspicions fell heavily on Collin right from the start. Of course, as you all know if you read my reviews, my guesses are typically worthless! So were they in the case? You'll have to read the story to find out. Perhaps I'm supposed to mistakenly think it's Collin; Carr is dropping endless, really clunky blaring announcements that it's him, while having Collin point an accusing finger at Brown. This ought to make me think it isn't Collin. OTOH, perhaps Carr is being so brazen with the clues because she wants us to think she wouldn't drop these massively telegraphic "hints" if it actually was him! Who knows - maybe it's Toby and he's implicating Collin out of resentment that he has to spend so much of his life keeping him out of trouble?
There are some serious errors over Mary Ann Nichols. She was not in her early twenties as Carr claims, but in her early forties and rather grey-haired! That's hardly a slight change, and the reason for it, which we learn of later, isn't exactly a plot killer. But even if we allow this first one to slide, where is the logic for changing any of the others? Contrary to their popular portrayal, the Ripper victims were not the young innocent women they're all too often misrepresented as in such stories. With the sole exception of the Ripper's last Canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly who actually was in her mid 20's, all of the victims were in their forties. These poor women were old before their time, and were worn and rather rough people, down on their circumstances and leading sad lives as casual prostitutes. This doesn't, of course, mean they merited death, nor does it mean they merited ill-treatment of any kind, so let's not disrespect them by mis-portraying them.
But the real problem with Carr's story here is that Nichols was killed at about 2:30 am, so there's no way in hell she could have died while Katie and her party were at the theater! And on the topic of 'whilst' vs 'while' - it's highly unlikely that a lower class seller of peanuts in the theater would say 'whilst' as opposed to 'while'! But we writers sometimes have a hard time not writing 'whilst' don't we? I torment myself over it often! Anyway, the theater trip was a mess, and it was glossed over in some respects, so we cannot tell who was in their seat and when. Also it was a long way from where Mary Nichols died, so it wasn't like someone could have slipped out, killed her and slipped back in very conveniently. Does this mean that no one at the theatre did it? The only one absent was Brown, who arrived very late and was the last one in possession of those opera glasses....
Other than the absurd obsession with those damned opera glasses, what bothered me most was about the theater was that Katie sat next to Oscar Wilde during the performance, was talking with him often, but never once thought to try and warn him to beware of the Marquess of Queensberry!
On the topic of language, Carr does a pretty decent job, but she comes off the rails once or twice as I discuss here. Worse than this, however, is the Cockney. It grated on my nerves with every obsessive-compulsive use of it, and it's way, way, w-a-y overdone. On language in general, a Brit would never say 'spigot' for faucet, for example, as she has present-day Toby do. They wouldn't say 'faucet', either; it's 'tap'. And I've never encountered an example of anyone of the upper classes refer to a friend as 'old sod'! I have no idea where she dug that one up. Neither would the old Duke say 'insure' in place of 'ensure'.
The common Cockney for suit is 'whistle' as in 'whistle and flute', not 'bag of fruit' That latter one might be allowable, but I've never heard it used! Later she has Toby use the term 'Scapa Flow' rhyming with 'go', but this usage would never have occurred in 1888 since 'Scapa Flow' refers to a British naval base not used before 1919, so Toby would not have known it. It has nothing to do with the term 'scarper' which does mean to beat a hasty retreat and is much more the kind of term Toby would have realistically used.
Carr also has the 1888 boys use the term 'rum and coke' rhyming with 'joke', but this term was not in use either, since Coca Cola had not been invented! Its precursor was only invented in 1886, and the Coca-Cola Company wasn't even incorporated until early 1888, so it was very highly unlikely that it would have crossed the Atlantic and been in sufficiently popular usage as a drink to be appropriated by the Cockney tongue in only five months. Carr tries to get around this by having them claim that 'coke' refers to a form of coal, but this excuse isn't even worthy of respect. It makes no sense whatsoever to talk about rum and coal!
She also has Collin use the phrase "That's not bleedin' funny", but I seriously doubt that the well-bred son of a Duke would drop letters or use the word 'bleeding'. Toby, yes, but not Collin; it simply didn't strike me as realistic. She has us believe that the Duke would issue Collin with a pocket knife for use in fights. This, again, didn't have any veracity in it for me at all. I keep trying to like this story, and it would be easy to do so in general terms, if the suspension of my disbelief wasn't let crash to the floor so frequently!
Anyway, having failed (for that matter, not even tried!) to save Mary Nichols, Katie unaccountably goes to her inquest. I can see no reason for this, especially since the bulk of the 'inquest' is completely fictional. Carr has Mary Ann's father, for example, show up, and she names him Jeffrey Nichols! It's 'Geoffrey' which is the English version of this name and which would most likely have been in use in that era, but all of that part of this novel is complete nonsense! Mary Ann's father was actually Edward Walker. I have no idea why Carr has completely fictionalized this.
Before Katie turns up at the inquest, she's forced by circumstances to share her secret with Toby and the increasingly obnoxious Collin, but instead of telling them that she'a a time-traveler, she claims she's clairvoyant. After passing a test set by the skeptical - or is it sceptical?! - Toby (who isn't quite skeptical enough!) she wins them over to her side in her attempt to stop Jack the Ripper, and this puts a fly in my Collin-is-the-Ripper ointment, because on a trip back to the future, Katie learns something. She also learns that future Toby has time-traveled and that she can only make one more trip: three's the charm evidently for time travel using the London Stone.
I must say that Carr has her menu rather heavily larded with herring regarding Collin's implication in the murders at this point, but whether they're red or not remains to be seen. The fly in the ointment regards Collin's short lifespan. Note that when Katie attends the inquest, Collin has less than a week to live - according to a glance at her family Bible back in the future which, of course, records births, deaths and marriages. In that Bible, Katie discovers the the Collin from the past died on September 9th, which means he couldn't have murdered Mary Kelly on November 9th.
However, since Katie returns to the past resolving to save Collin from his premature death, perhaps in rescuing him, she condemns Mary Kelly to die? The problem with the family Bible in this context, is that this is a rather peculiarly (although not exclusively) American thing, not really a British thing. Though Bibles were used for such records in England in the Victorian era, the tradition died; however, lets assume that this particular Bible may have been used in Victorian times and then simply kept in storage without the tradition continuing. See - I can compromise!
I have to say I think Katie's assessment at the inquest (prompted by the smell!) that people only washed once per week seems overly generous of her! There was a phrase in England 'Ne'er cast a clout 'til May be out' which means no-one takes off their winter clothing until the weather warms up. They live work and sleep in their one winter outfit, and perhaps take a bath in the spring, so bathing even once per week is stretching it IMO! The problem is that none of us lived back then, and we have little to go on as to the daily lives of your everyday working classes which I find really sad. So once/week it is!
But if I allow that, then I have to say "No! Shelly Carr, it's libelous to tell your readers that people were still jailed for witchcraft in the Victorian era in Britain, even if those words leave the mouth of one of your characters!" That accusation isn't true at all. The last trial for witchcraft in Britain was in 1712, and that woman was reprieved. Such superstition! That doesn't mean people didn't believe in such absurdities, but it's not illegal to believe crazy things. Not even in Britain. And let's contrast that with the USA, shall we? The Salem witch trials took place in 1878, just a decade before the Ripper era, and we all know how evil those were!
Carr also gives us misinformation about "Long Liz" Stride, one of the five Canonical Ripper victims, but one who may not actually have been killed by him (or her!). Katie conveniently happens to run into Liz in a pawn shop where she, Toby, and the obnoxious Collin are attempting to buy back the opera glasses which Cross has pawned. Stride is pawning her wedding ring which is dated 1881 (the year of the famous gunfight at the OK corral!), but Stride actually married in 1869, and her husband didn't disappear, as is implied in this novel. The two of them simply broke up, and Stride had no children. The dock worker she lived with (not married to) was named Michael, not Alfred. Why Carr has changed all of this remains at mystery.
Toby, in an attempt to find the truth from Katie about how she knows what she knows, takes her, in a Matrix-moment(!) to the 'Oracle' at the Tower of London (about which there's a rather large and unnecessary info-dump which I skipped), but the Oracle cannot see or hear Katie. Yes, the Oracle is blind, but she can't see her psychically! It's like she doesn't exist. This spooks Toby, so he takes her onto a London Underground train - at that time hauled by steam engines, where the carriages supposedly fill with noxious fumes. I can't buy that. Yes, I can buy that it smelled down there and was less than the most pleasant experience, but not that it was the gas chamber which Carr portrays. But Katie gives in and 'fesses up to Toby that she's a time-traveler.
So off Toby and Collin go to warn "Dark Annie" Chapman that she's made the cut next on the Ripper's hit parade. Why they do this is a complete mystery, Why not simply follow Annie around on the night the Ripper gets her and apprehend him there and then, before he can kill her?! Again Carr gives misleading information about Chapman. Carr describes her as tall when she was actually the shortest of all the victims, at only five feet. And Carr claims that in age, she looked thirty but could have been anywhere between twenty and forty, when she was in fact the oldest victim at almost fifty. Carr gives her black hair when it was actually dark brown, and has her married to a military man when she had never married any such person and was living with a sieve maker when she was murdered. Again, why change these facts? It makes no sense, adds nothing whatsoever to the story, and is just plan annoying, to say nothing of outright insulting to these murder victims. What does Carr hope to gain by this behavior, other than alienating an intelligent, thinking readership?
Annie Chapman is murdered as is "Georgie" Cross. Both Toby and Katie now are convinced, because of the circumstances, that Brown did it, but the fact remains that Collin had the opportunity to kill both of them. Toby was there at the time and failed to prevent it. Katie and Toby tell the Duke what happened and that they believe it was Brown, and the Duke believes them. He's now convinced that Brown is setting up Collin in order to use his implication in the Ripper murders to blackmail the Duke into consenting to his suit for Beatrix.
I have to say that the further this story is drifting from what actually happened. the less I'm enjoying it. It's like reading historical fiction about Martin Luther King and finding that he's white, or reading that Oscar Wilde was a little wuss who couldn't defend himself...oh, wait a minute, Carr actually did imply that! I'm anxious to see how this pans out if only to learn whether Carr actually can account for the disturbing number of stretchers she's employed, because I find it hard to believe that a writer would take this many liberties without having a good reason for it. Will this confusion of victims pan out? What will actually happen to Dora Fowler, for example - who absurdly turns up at Annie Chapman's house (which is where Carr has Chapman killed) after the murder? Must we suspect Dora as the Ripper now?!
After an absurd chase around London's Whitechapel district, Katie runs into Dora and they both start climbing the skeleton of Tower Bridge, which was two years into an eight-year build at that time. The ostensible reason for this is that Toby and Collin are up there, but we're offered no good reason at all as to why they are up there, so all we can conclude is that Carr is taking a page out of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie and having her finale on the structure.
The problem with this scheme is that the superstructure couldn't have been started until the two deep anchor pilings were in place and those had to be excavated and filled with 70,000 tons of concrete before the twin towers could be built on them. The towers themselves were only half finished in 1892, so there would have been precious little to scale four years earlier in 1888, as this drawing confirms!
Once again, Le Stupide prevails as Katie abandons Dora on the scaffolding, and continues alone to try and reach Collin and Toby up top (which of course didn't exist in 1888). Note that this is the girl who came back to the past with the express intention of thwarting Jack the Ripper, leaving one of his known victims (known to Katie, not known in reality) defenseless as she climbs up in a brain-dead effort to find Toby and Collin. When she gets up there, she finds both of them: Toby unconscious, and Collin fighting Major Brown. At this point we know one fact for certain: We know that Brown is going to fall into the river and be presumed dead, but that he will actually not be dead, and sure enough, that's what happens (at least the first part). Oh, and the Reverend Pinker is also in the area. What? Yes, you heard me. Let's lard-up this already convoluted "plot" with yet another red herring. Pinker is not only pink in name but also in hue, so red herring is particularly appropriate in his case.
I'll finish this up here, since I've gone into way more detail than I intended. Hopefully it will be more than enough for you to judge for yourself, because you're going to have to make your own choice about this (as I hope you always do!). Yes, Ripped intrigued me, but in the end it just didn't get my bunny hopping. It wasn't that the story itself was so bad, but there were too many inexplicables for me - where I was left asking "what?". I don't like stories like that, but maybe you will like this one. Maybe this one for someone who knows a lot less about the Ripper murders than I do - but then that was the sole reason I opted to read it in the first place!
And no, I don't know who did it! No one does; that's why the true events are so fascinating for writers. You can make up your own explanation, as indeed I did in the Manuscript Found in a Lead Casket short story which is contained in the Poem y Granite collection.
