Jaclyn the Ripper

By James Frenkel, Senior Editor

I was working at Dell Books and the Delacorte Press when they published Karl Alexander’s Time After Time, a way-cool novel about H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper. I loved that novel (still do) and the movie, too. I think I fell in love with Mary Steenburgen then (as her co-star Malcolm McDowell did, too, during the shoot.)

I bought a novel by Alexander in the late ‘80s, Papa and Fidel, so I knew he was fun to work with. But I wasn’t sure what to expect when he offered me his new novel, Jaclyn the Ripper. He and I talked about the fact that he had always been fascinated by a minor branch of Ripper-ology, the theory that Jack the Ripper might have been a woman.  It was a strange, intriguing concept.

But to write about Jack the Ripper turning into a woman, that was a real challenge.

I don’t know if anyone has ever gotten into the psychopathology of Jack the Ripper the way that Alexander does in this book. He posits the Ripper as having been brought up with a sister who was abused by their father. As Alexander plays it, Jack was smitten with his beautiful, older sister, who sought comfort in his young arms.  When he discovered that she wasn’t his alone, it twisted him (one can only wonder if he, too, had been abused by their father).

When Jack becomes Jaclyn, she is first appalled by her newfound femaleness…and then is fascinated by it, and by the effect her charms have on men. I can’t give away the details here, but the psychodynamics of the love/hate relationship in Jaclyn’s mind play out in a surprising way. At one point, despite her twisted feelings about love and sex, she falls in love and imagines marriage and children. It’s one of the most riveting, strange love stories I’ve ever read.

There’s a lot more going on in the novel than just Jaclyn’s twisted love. There’s time travel and the return of H.G. Wells and his wife, Amy. There’s the story of two men, both displaced in time and one transformed into the opposite sex; two men who once were friends but now are the deadliest of enemies. And it’s the story of the unfinished hunt for the world’s first serial killer, Jack the Ripper. And like its predecessor this book would make a kick-ass film!

from the Tor/Forge November 2009 newsletter)