‘Knife’ pits Jack the Ripper against Sherlock Holmes’ creator
Over the years, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper have squared off frequently in films, video games and a number of novels. “A Knife in the Fog,” however, lays the responsibility for solving the notorious Whitechapel murders not on Holmes but his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Who, it must be said, had a lot of help.
Though he’s hardly the first to suggest this scenario, Bradley Harper’s debut novel is a persuasive account of what might well have happened during the three-year gap between Doyle’s first Holmes novel, “A Study in Scarlet,” and 1890’s “The Sign of Four.” In gaining the kind of shoeleather experience that would prove invaluable in future Holmes stories, the physicianturned-detective and his colleagues all but shout, “The game is afoot!”
Besides a committed Sherlockian, Harper is a retired U.S. Army pathologist, which adds further credibility to his descriptions of the thennascent field of forensic criminology. Nevermind fingerprinting; think about how easily these murders might have been solved if London’s police at the time understood how much evidence could have been preserved simply by not washing a corpse before an autopsy was performed.
But hey, maybe the Ripper murders would have confounded even the lab rats of “CSI.” We may never know.
Much like Dr. Watson, Harper’s Doyle is a bit gruff, easily abashed and somewhat obtuse. Though not fully blind to the deductive arts, he is in need of much coaching. Summoned to London from his practice in Portsmouth, he leaves his expectant wife in the south of England at the behest of a pale, officious gentleman calling himself Wilkins, personal secretary to Prime Minister William Gladstone.
Citing his admiration for “A Study in Scarlet” and the PM’s sympathy for London’s working girls, Wilkins offers Doyle a handsome sum, as well as room and board at the posh Marlborough Club on Pall Mall, in exchange for a month of his time to investigate these shockingly brutal murders with the utmost discretion.
Immediately, the physician acknowledges the Ripper case to be well beyond his selfprofessed feeble powers of intuition and suggests he call on his mentor and model for his hawk-nosed fictional detective: Dr. Joseph Bell, the gallant, taciturn Scottish surgeon who also happens to be attending physician whenever Her Majesty is in residence at the royal retreat of Balmoral.
Agreeing, Wilkins steers the duo to another remarkable real-life figure: Margaret Harkness, author (under the pseudonym “John Law”) of the novels “Out of Work” and “A City Girl,” a freelance journalist currently residing in the same East End as the Ripper’s victims, some of whom she knew. Harkness defuses the pervasive sexism of her era with ingenuity, aplomb and sheer determination — often by assuming the masculine alter ego of one “Mr. Pennyworth.”
Though her calling lay elsewhere, she would have made a fine detective; mercifully, Doyle is more or less able to keep his budding crush on her at bay. Taking a page from Dumas, the trio christen themselves the Three Musketeers: Doyle as the guileless Porthos to Bell’s worldlier Athos and Harkness’s perceptive, conflicted Aramis.
All for one and one for all, they set forth into the severely crowded slum of which, Doyle notes, “the consensus among the Metropolitan Police was that Whitechapel contained a level of vice and villainy unequaled in the British Isles. I am ashamed to say I saw poverty and human degradation on those streets that I did not know existed in my native land.”
On top of that, the “Leather Apron” murders — so called because someone wearing such an article of clothing, a necessity to many a Jewish tradesman, was seen shortly before the first victim was found — have turned the neighborhood into a simmering cauldron of anti-Semitism, which the police expect to boil over at any moment.
“A Knife in the Fog” is as gory as any good Jack the Ripper tale should be. But for all the blood-and-gaslight atmosphere, for which Harper himself consulted Ripper expert Richard Jones, it might all be so much rote pennydreadful fiction if not for some memorably crafted characters.
The killer truly delights in his depravity and taunting his pursuers. Doyle’s earnest narration carries more than a little of Watson’s endearing cluelessness; Bell is every bit the intellectual equal of Holmes, albeit with a much kinder disposition; and Harkness is a magnificently rendered proto-feminist at a time when such a calling was even more hazardous than it is today.
Even Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde manage to work their way into the story. Harper’s novel will easily whet readers’ seemingly eternal appetite for novel solutions to this most ghastly of Victorian murders.