Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend [Paperback]

Richard Wallace (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 293 pages
• Publisher: Gemini Pr; 1st edition (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0962719560
• ISBN-13: 978-0962719561
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,047,215 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars You can anagram anything, June 15, 2002

By 

Joel Shore - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend (Paperback)

As another reviewer has already pointed out, when an excerpt of this book appeared in Harper's Magazine, Francis Heaney and Guy Jacobson wrote a letter to the editor in which they came up with an anagram for the first paragraph of Wallace's excerpt that was far "superior" to any of the anagrams that Wallace had found in Lewis Carroll's work!

Since part of that review seems to have been cut off, I will repeat this wonderful anagram here. The original text was: "This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland."

The anagram by Heaney and Jacobson reads: "The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too."

It seemed so implausible to me that they could come up with such a perfect anagram that I actually checked on the computer to verify that it is an exact anagram! I think that this anagram shows (better than a thousand arguments about how easy it is to anagram fairly large passages!) that Wallace's thesis is bunk. Or else we must put Wallace at the top of our suspect list for Nicole Brown's murder!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic of crackpot scholarship, August 22, 2000

By 

Andrew Bulhak (London, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend (Paperback)

Exhaustively analysing the letters of Jack the Ripper and the writings of Lewis Carroll, deriving lurid confessions out of anagrams and making numerous bold leaps from the most dubious of premises, Wallace comes up with a classic. Anyone who collects psychoceramic literature should have this book, preferably right next to a treatise on the connection between UFOs, the Vatican and the Loch Ness Monster or some similar topic.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This book is insane., April 2, 2004

By 

Matthew W Rossi (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend (Paperback)

First off, this book doesn't prove that Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper. It doesn't even come close. What it does do is show how a fertile imagination can take a few facts and run wild with them: it's speculative nonfiction at its finest, or more accurately, speculative non-narrative fiction. I'd be disappointed to discover that Wallace believes in his lunatic thesis, but I wasn't at all disappointed to read it. It's berserk and methodical at the same time, a shining gem of surreality.