The Fabulous Destiny of Marked Accordingly

“Who are you, Columbo?” - Extras

Imagine that I, immediately upon commencement of this review of Patricia Cornwell’s “Portrait of a Killer”, were to segue into a discursive essay on the subject of the paper on which the book is printed. Who produced it? Where? How? What exactly is its material composition? How is the paper in the hardback different from that of the paperback, or the British edition from the American? And say then that I was to marshall a numbers of facts pertinent to the solution of the above questions, shored up here and there with enough speculation to make my conclusions doubtful and enough name-dropping to make my motives even more so. If I was then to present this somewhat contentious argument to you as irrefutable PROOF of the errant stupidity of Cornwell’s book, well, gentle reader, what might you think? I, in the true spirit of Cornwellianism, will TELL you what you might think. You might think that my argument has more or less made sense; at no point has your knowledge or intuition regarding the manufacture of paper ran contrary to mine; and if, in the course of my burbling enthusiasm, I have stretched a few possiblys into probablys, well, that is only to be expected in a work of this nature. Essaying the facts at your disposal, you may be inclined to conclude that my argument, if not exactly watertight, certainly constitutes a respectable enough theory in regard to the book-production process, and that whilst in some regards I have perhaps added little to the fund of human knowledge about ink, say, or the glue in the hardback binding, I have provided an adequate explanation of the facts of the matter as they appear to stand. It is perhaps not altogether clear to you in what relation the paper from which the book is composed stands to the quality of the book itself, but clearly there must be SOME connection, and as my handling of all other aspects of the debate -some of which, it is to be admitted, were somewhat beyond your understanding in any case- was clearly astute, you are willing to concede that it is your own obtuseness or inattention to detail which has led, in this particular instance, to your failure to comprehend my reasoning. Indeed, you could go back and read it all again, find out what it was that passed you by first time around, but frankly you are getting a little tired of reading about paper, and possibly would not have bothered embarking upon my opus magnum if you had known that that was what it was all about. Still, the central thesis stands good, you have learned something, and should intelligent conversation turn Cornwell-wards at a dinner party, you will be adequately equipped to pronounce upon the stupidity of her work, if in somewhat sketchy detail.

Possibly you think I am joking, or at least enjoying the self-indulgence of an extended metaphorical conceit. But no. “Portrait of a Killer”, ostensibly Patricia Cornwell’s irrefutable identification of Jack the Ripper as the artist Walter Sickert, is actually a book about paper. Through long and windy recapitulations of scientific analyses into the paper on which the Ripper letters to the Police were written, Cornwell advances her central thesis that we can’t PROVE Sickert didn’t write any of the Ripper letters and, therefore, between August and November 1888, was gruesomely a-murdering of at least five London prostitutes. (Many more according to Cornwell, who finds the Ripper’s fingerprints everywhere, and is ripe pickings for an Internet meme featuring pictures of Jack the Ripper killing JFK/Cock Robin/the ‘72 Denver Broncos.) You the reader! You need know no more than that of the vast proliferation of Ripper-related correspondence of the time only one or two are accepted by Ripperologists as genuine candidates for authentic Ripper authorship, the rest being uniformly fakes and frauds and attention-seeking copycats. Even if Cornwell, as she never does, proved that Sickert HAD written one of the letters, she would have uncovered no more than a perhaps sordid sense of humour on his part. So that won’t do, and is the end of any serious scholarship or debate in either her book or this review.

The rest, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is daftness, overladen with the cheap narrative devices of detective fiction. A ridiculous, overwrought prologue, in which Cornwell grapples with the shattering knowledge that she is the only person who knows who the Ripper is and must pass alone into the murk and gory gloom of his psyche there to etc. The breathless passages of forced psychological tension and fear in which we are given to believe that the Ripper watches her every move, possessing all the spectral, timeless powers of Freddy Krueger. The spiralling-abyss-of-men’s-souls monologue on motive-explaining madness. The emotive melodramatic outbursts against Sickert, establishing the intimate, ineluctable bond of fate and hatred between killer and detective, the fucking fanfare of kazoos which heralds every so-called discovery! “Whit a performance!” my gran used to say of any ham-fisted attempt at effect; it is to be wished that Patricia Cornwell’s gran had been so brutally and uncompromisingly frank.

And so on. All arguments about the physical and mental qualities and aptitudes of the Ripper, his height, weight, anatomic knowledge, handwriting and so forth, are airily dismissed by Cornwell on the basis that Sickert was a man of infinite leisure and resources, a veritable Bruce Wayne of crime who could very well have spent his spare time learning calligraphy/surgery/the violin/the art of disguise/the Charles Atlas program/how to grow shorter in seven easy steps. How Cornwell’s Sickert found the time off from night school to go around butchering people is anybody’s guess, especially seeing as he was clearly spending his daylight hours in profitable study of train and boat timetables, making sure he could get back and forth from holidays in France and still have time to get a nice little murder under his belt. I am much cheered by the thought of a clockwatching Ripper suddenly abandoning his latest mutilation midway through for a passenger-pleasing pursuit of the last City bus, jeering, drunken students egging him on through the back window as he pants pathetically along as fast as his fat, blood-soaked little legs will carry him.

It is a stupid book, but does the person stupid enough to have written it actually exist? Is the whole thing rendered more palatable by the hypothesis of a cynically manipulative Cornwell counting on her readers’ idiocy, or by a supremely arrogant moron who genuinely thinks that she has succeeded where Scotland Yard’s finest, and over a hundred years of dedicated scholars and researchers, have failed? Is Jaws 3 worse because it doesn’t know it’s bad, or Jaws 4 because it knows and doesn’t care? A question to perplex the sages: someone needs to find out what kind of film they were recorded on.