A ripping yarn
Enjoys a lively adventure story that breathes new life into myths surrounding Jack the Ripper
The Prince and the Whitechapel Murders by Saul David Hodder, 304 pages, £18.99
Major George Hart, a soldier in Queen Victoria’s army, has an unusual family background. His forebears include not only a Zulu chieftain but also, he has reason to believe, a member of the British royal family.
Summoned by the Duke of Cambridge, the man Hart suspects may be his father, the major is given a difficult task. He is to act as nursemaid to Prince ‘Eddy’, Victoria’s grandson and second in line to the throne. The prince’s life is threatened by Irish Fenians, intent on assassination, but this is not the only danger from which the young prince must be protected. Eddy has rendered himself liable to blackmail through his liaisons with other men, and has also taken to slumming it in Whitechapel’s squalid streets. His presence there on nights when the serial killer soon to be known as Jack the Ripper murders his victims provides further problems for Hart to solve. When the fragment of a letter, apparently in the prince’s handwriting, is found at the scene of one of the killings, the major decides he must act. Joining forces with a maverick police officer, he launches his own investigation into the Ripper murders. What follows is a journey into a heart of darkness.
Leading military historian Saul David has written two previous novels about the resourceful Major Hart, one set in South Africa at the time of the Zulu Wars and the other in Afghanistan during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. This third excursion for the character takes him no further than London’s East End, but obliges him to confront dangers just as life-threatening as those faced on farflung battlefields. The theory of possible royal involvement in the Ripper murders (long since thoroughly discredited) is not a new one, but Saul David cunningly weaves together history and fiction to breathe new life into old ideas about the killings. The result is an exciting and entertaining adventure story.