One of the least credible theories regarding the identity of Jack the Ripper insists the serial killer was Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a practicing physician prior to gaining wider fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes with the publication of “A Study in Scarlet” in 1887. There is no evidence – not even the most frayed wisp of preposterous circumstance – to place Conan Doyle in Whitechapel at the time of the killings, let alone providing him with a motive for the crimes.
But that’s not to say that the author of Britain’s most celebrated mystery fiction did not have a link with Britain’s most baffling real-life mystery. In 1894, a newspaper in Portsmouth, England, called The Evening News ran a brief article with the title “How Sherlock Holmes Would Have Tracked Him.” The text of the article went like this:
“Dr. Conan Doyle, in an interview with an American journalist, has explained how ‘Sherlock Holmes’ would have set about the work of tracking the notorious Whitechapel miscreant. He says:—
“I am not in the least degree either sharp or an observant man myself. I try to get inside the skin of a sharp man and see how things would strike him. I remember going to the Scotland Yard Museum and looking at the letter which was received by the police, and which purported to come from the Ripper. Of course, it may have been a hoax, but there were reasons to think it genuine, and in any case it was well to find out who wrote it. It was written in red ink in a clerkly hand. I tried to think how Holmes might have deduced the writer of that letter. The most obvious point was that the letter was written by someone who had been in America. It began ‘Dear Boss,’ and contained the phrase, ‘fix it up,’ and several others which are not usual with the Britishers. Then we have the quality of the paper and the handwriting, which indicate that the letters were not written by a toiler. It was good paper, and a round, easy, clerkly hand. He was, therefore, a man accustomed to the use of a pen.
“Having determined that much, we can not avoid the inference that there must be somewhere letters which this man had written over his own name, or documents or accounts that could be readily traced to him. Oddly enough, the police did not, as far as I know, think of that, and so they failed to accomplish anything. Holmes’s plan would have been to reproduce the letters facsimile and on each plate indicate briefly the peculiarities of the handwriting. Then publish these facsimiles in the leading newspapers of Great Britain and America, and in connection with them offer a reward to anyone who could show a letter or any specimen of the same handwriting. Such a course would have enlisted millions of people as detectives in the case.”
Separate from the interview, Conan Doyle speculated that Jack the Ripper disguised himself as a woman while enacted his gruesome crimes. The cross dressing was done to avoid detection and capture, and in women’s clothing he would be able to gain closer access to the unsuspecting prostitutes who became his victims. The idea of the killer in women’s clothing was floated by Frederick Abberline, the chief inspector for the London Metropolitan Police, who was flummoxed by testimony by Caroline Maxwell that she saw Mary Kelly twice several hours after she was murdered – Maxwell claimed the person she saw was wearing “a dark shirt, velvet bodice and a maroon-colored shawl.” When pressed if these were Kelly’s clothes, Maxwell insisted that she recalled Kelly wearing the shawl.
Abberline had a different theory given to him by Conan Doyle – if the killer was wearing Kelly’s clothing, it would have to be a woman rather than a cross-dressing man. He reportedly asked Dr. Thomas Dutton, “Do you think it could be a case not of Jack the Ripper but Jill the Ripper?” Dutton was skeptical of the theory, believing that only someone trained and active as a midwife and/or an abortionist would have been able to possess the anatomical knowledge create the level of physical havoc resulting in the victims’ mutilation.
Conan Doyle never siphoned the Whitechapel murders for his Sherlock Holmes stories. While there is no recorded interview on why he opted to avoid a fictionalized account of the crimes, most likely Conan Doyle would have faced criticism for lacing the gruesome true-life murders into his literary creations.
“A Study in Terror”
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the notion of putting Sherlock Holmes in pursuit of Jack the Ripper was conceived, and only then it came through an unlikely source – Herman Cohen, an American movie producer specializing in Grade-Z output such as “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” and “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” (both in 1957), had relocated to London in the late 1950s to churn out a series of low-budget, high-energy mayhem features including “Horrors of the Black Museum” (1959), “The Headless Ghost” (1959) and “Konga” (1961). Cohen wanted to continue his success in producing energetic exploitation films with a vehicle that offered a more significant degree of respectability. The brothers Derek and Donald Ford suggested creating a Sherlock Holmes thriller involving Jack the Ripper and wrote the first draft of the screenplay. Cohen obtained the rights to the Sherlock Holmes character from Sir Nigel Films, which controlled the rights to the Conan Doyle’s intellectual property, and secured financing from Columbia Pictures that would help elevate the film above the cheapjack knockabout that Cohen previously created.
“A Study in Terror” is notable for the being the first Jack the Ripper-themed film that uses the some of the names of the killer’s victims – although the only connection between the women and their real-life circumstances is their names.
The film’s pre-credit sequence features a streetwalker who accosted on a Whitechapel street by an unseen assailant and left for dead with a knife through her neck. This character is later referred to as “Emma Smith” by another prostitute, Polly Nichols. But unlike the real Polly Nichols (also known as Mary Ann Nichols), the film’s version – played by sultry German actress Christiane Maybach – meets her doom when the killer thrusts her head into the water of a horse trough before stabbing her.
The next victim is Annie Chapman, who is played with a broad Cockney comic tinge by the young blonde Barbara Windsor, who later gained popularity as part of the zany “Carry On” series. In this presentation, Chapman is denied access to her flat by her landlady for nonpayment of rent. After unsuccessfully seeking money from her meatpacker boyfriend Chunky, she is grabbed on the street and wrestled to the ground before being stabbed to death.
Somewhat more accurate is the killing of Elizabeth Stride, which is depicted with a throat slashing. But the film also reinvents her as a young woman (in this case, lovely actress Norma Foster) and it imagines her flirting with two sailors before being shooed off to her home by a humorless constable who finds her body minutes later.
Mary Kelly’s murder occurs in her flat – the film presents her tossing the key to an interested client in the street – and her murder is under the glow of a red light. As with the other women, she has been glamorized for the film, in this case with Edina Ronay and her considerable cleavage barely contained in form-fitting corset.
Oddly, the film neglects to show Jack the Ripper’s murder of Catherine Eddowes – although she is a character in the film played by an age-appropriate Kay Walsh in a wordless blink-and-you-miss-it moment as a pub patron with lamentable table manners.
To its credit, the film cites the “Dear Boss” letter. But beyond that, no other aspects of the crime spree are included in the story, which finds Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as interested observers to the Whitechapel murders via the newspaper coverage of the killings. They are incorporated into the investigation after receive a mysterious parcel from an unknown sender. The parcel contains a case of surgical instruments with a missing scalpel, which they surmise is the weapon used in the murders. The case bears the crest of an aristocratic family which Holmes traces to the Duke of Shires (a fictional character). In speaking with the duke, they learn his eldest son Michael had studied to become a doctor, but disappeared during his studies and is believed to be dead; this is confirmed by Lord Carfax, the duke’s younger son. Holmes theorizes the surgical instruments were pawned to a Whitechapel broker, whom he tracks down through extraordinary deductions including a sunlight fading of the case’s cloth.
Holmes and Watson locate the missing Michael, who had been beaten into a brain damaged state by a pub owner named Steiner in a blackmail scheme that went awry and resulted in Steiner’s lover being scarred with acid thrown in her face. Holmes unmasks Lord Carfax as Jack the Ripper, who has been killing prostitutes in a warped act of revenge on behalf of his brother. Lord Carfax, Angela and Steiner are killed in a fire at the pub, with Holmes being the only person to escape the blaze. But rather than share his findings with the police, Holmes decides to protect the honor of the Duke of Shire’s family and keep the secret of Jack the Ripper to himself.
To be charitable, “A Study in Terror” makes little sense – but the film seems to be striving to achieve a victory of style over substance. Cinematographer Desmond Dickinson, who shot the classics “Hamlet” (1948) and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1952), happily used the Eastman Color film stock in capturing the garish excesses of Whitechapel’s seedier corners, and Polly Nichols’ death is joltingly captured as her blood’s red hue quickly filled the inky water of the trough where she was submerged while being stabbed. Curiously, producer Herman Cohen originally wanted the film to be called “Fog,” which might have raised too many questions from viewers noticing the absence of fog in the film’s twilight London streets.
“A Study in Terror” followed a trend in 1960s films of packing the cast with recognizable stars in smaller roles. In this case, Frank Finlay plays Inspector Lestrade (this was the same year he turned in his Oscar-nominated performance as Iago opposite Laurence Olivier’s Othello), Robert Morley turns up as Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft (also the first time Mycroft is a character on-screen), Anthony Quayle is a mortician, West End musical star Georgia Brown is a pub singer and champion British boxer Terry Downes is the meatpacker Chunky. Smaller roles went to little-known actors Patrick Newell (who later gained small screen fame as Mother on “The Avengers”) as a constable, and Corin Redgrave and Jeremy Lloyd as pub patrons.
As for Holmes and Watson, “A Study in Terror” is the rare film of this genre where Holmes and Watson are the least interesting characters. John Neville and Donald Houston seem to have patterned their performances after the popular interpretations by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, albeit without Rathbone’s zestful line readings and Bruce’s lapses into charming bumbling. Neville’s Holmes even takes a moment to declare “Elementary, my dear Watson!” – a catchphrase not found in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories.
“A Study in Terror” opened in the United Kingdom in October 1965 to audience favor, but Columbia Pictures held up its United States release until August 1966. The studio seemed baffled on how to market the film, opting for an advertising campaign that heralded the cape-wearing Sherlock Holmes as “the original caped crusader” amid cartoon balloon sound effects of “BANG!”, “CRUNCH!” and “BIFF!” – why the studio hoped to confuse Sherlock Holmes with the television “Batman” series is unclear.
A novelization published as an Ellery Queen mystery was also offered as a tie-in, but this only added to further confusion by having the pseudonymous Ellery Queen reviewing a manuscript that presents the film’s story.
“Murder by Decree”
Ten years after “A Study in Terror” crossed the Atlantic for its United States release, the British writer Stephen Knight published the book “Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.” Knight presented a unique theory on the identity of the person behind the Whitechapel crime spree – it was not a single person, but an elaborate network of men with connections to the British royal family and the Freemasonry movement.
At the center of Knight’s case was a cover-up involving Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the grandson of Queen Victoria and the second in line to the throne. Knight insisted that Prince Albert Victor fell in love with and was secretly married to Annie Elizabeth Crook, a Catholic working-class girl he met while she was an artist’s model. Mary Kelly, a friend of Crook, was a witness to the secret wedding ceremony. The unlikely couple had a daughter and the prince kept his wife and child in a secret London apartment.
However, the theory veered into tragedy when Queen Victoria and the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury allegedly discovered the prince’s secret and sought to prevent it from becoming public. The royal family kept the prince from going out into public while Crook was steered into an insane asylum – but before she was institutionalized, she gave their child to Kelly, who brought her to a convent where she was raised.
In trying to track down Mary Kelly, the men seeking to keep this story quiet prowled London in search of Kelly and the women she counted as her confidants. According to this theory, the Jack the Ripper murders were staged by the physician Sir William Gull and a cab driver named John Netley to seek out Kelly and those close to her to stifle the scandal.
Knight’s book was mostly inspired by Jonathan Gorman, who first surfaced in a 1973 BBC documentary “Jack the Ripper” by claiming he was the illegitimate son of the painter Walter Sickert, who supposedly introduced the prince and Crook four decades earlier. Gorman, who was born in 1925, claimed his mother was the daughter of the secret union between Crook and the prince, and that his father informed him of this long-buried story.
However, Gorman’s information about his alleged family history was easily discredited by simple fact-checking. Crook was not Catholic, nor was she institutionalized in a mental asylum. In fact, she was easily found in various census reports over the years and it was determined that she lived in poverty for much of her adult life while suffering from epilepsy; she died at the age of 58 in 1920. There is no evidence that she and the prince were ever in the same place at the same time.
But why should facts pollute a jolly conspiracy? The story proved to be yet another colorful fantasy linked to the doomed heir to the throne. In the decades following his untimely death at the age of 28, Prince Albert Victor was the subject of wild rumors regarding his sex life. Perhaps the zaniest claim was that he was Jack the Ripper, roaming through Whitechapel and murdering unsuspecting prostitutes. That theory was easily disproved when records showed he was not in London during the crime spree.
Another story accused the prince of being linked to the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal involving several aristocrats who frequented a homosexual brothel. Again, there was no evidence to support the assertions that the prince frequented this tawdry setting, but that didn’t stop the silly tale from taking root in popular culture.
The prince’s untimely death also proved to be the source of melodramatic speculation, with causes ranging from syphilis to murder. The truth was less colorful – he died during the Asiatic flu pandemic in 1892.
It is not surprising that a historic figure who could inspire such wacky conspiracy theories would have his reputation hijacked into a bizarre story linking the royal family to the Whitechapel murders.
“Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution” became something of a publishing and pop culture curio when it appeared in 1976. Despite devastating reviews that easily poked holes in Knight’s presentation and Gorman’s belated acknowledgment that his story was a hoax, the book was a popular title that fit in perfectly into the trend of conspiracy theories that percolated across the 1970s.
John Hopkins, a British writer who was best known for his scripts for the BBC crime drama “Z Cars” and as the co-writer for the 1965 James Bond opus “Thunderball,” believed that Knight’s wobbly but intriguing work could be transitioned into a mystery movie. But rather than offer a straightforward dramatization of the Whitechapel murders, Hopkins decided to expand its concept by turning it into a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
Injecting Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson amid real-life characters was not uncommon. Of course, “A Study in Terror” provided a very loose consideration of the Jack the Ripper crimes, even though the few facts related to the case were wildly reconfigured for the big screen. Two other films from the 1970s – Billy Wilder in his 1970 “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” (with Queen Victoria making an appearance) and Herbert Ross’ 1976 “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (with Sigmund Freud treating Holmes) also mixed historic figures with Conan Doyle’s characters. Both of those films also spun the cinematic concepts of Holmes and Watson away from the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce interpretations into more contemporary considerations, with Holmes becoming more neurotic and humane while Watson emerged as an intellectual equal rather than a mere sidekick.
Arguably, the best of the 1970s Sherlock Holmes films was “Murder by Decree” from 1979. In concept, this should have been the least successful. Canadian director Bob Clark was known for low-budget horror flicks such as “Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” (1972), “Deathdream” (1974) and “Black Christmas” (1974) – he didn’t seem the like the logical choice to helm a period costume thriller originally slated to offer megastars Peter O’Toole as Holmes and Laurence Olivier as Watson.
But the two stars did not get along and both dropped out, to be replaced by the less showy but more grounded Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson. The replacement casting was inspired. Plummer offered a degree of relaxed confidence rarely seen in cinematic Holmes performances – he knew that he was the center of the story and didn’t need to excessively burn his star wattage. (He previously played Holmes in the 1977 television film “Silver Blaze”). Mason’s Watson offered the dignified maturity of Victorian gentleman that brought the character a level of respect as an individual in his own right, rather than being seen as merely a sidekick or comic relief. And while his Watson gets into one messy dilemma when he tries to interview a prostitute who might be a witness to the murders, his character’s droll sincerity enables the retention of dignity under embarrassing circumstances.
The beauty of “Murder by Decree” is how it brings a 1970s vibe of conspiracy theories and distrust of authority into the 1889 setting without creating a blatant anachronism. The film establishes an anti-authority environment early in the story when the late arrival of the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) to an opera performance creates rude response from the proletariat audience members of the theater’s upper balconies. Mason’s Dr. Watson reacts in outrage – he is Old English, loyal to the crown and the traditions of the kingdom. Plummer’s Holmes is more amused at both his dear friend’s loyalist response to the insult aimed at the royal figure and to the loud displeasure of the anti-royalist sentiments from the seats at the far corner of the theater.
Holmes’ amusement soon turns to bafflement when the Whitechapel murder spree continues without any sense of resolution. While Holmes’ old frenemy Inspector Lestrade (played by Frank Finlay, repeating his role from “A Study in Terror”) would gladly welcome Holmes’ input in the unsolved murders, Scotland Yard’s new superintendent Sir Charles Warren (Anthony Quayle, another carryover from “A Study in Terror,” albeit in a different persona) is oddly not eager to seek any help from Holmes – this character is politically connected to the upper echelons of government, which raises more suspicion regarding his motives.
At the same time, local Whitechapel merchants feel differently about the chaos created in the Jack the Ripper murders and beseech the famed detective to solve the mystery. Holmes is sympathetic to these pleas and agrees to go on the trail of the alleged Jack the Ripper – which takes him into territories that he never expected.
“Murder by Decree” adheres to the theories spun by Jonathan Gorman and Stephen Knight regarding the illicit union of Prince Albert Victor and Annie Crook, although the suspects Sir William Gull and John Netley were renamed for the film (clearly to buffer the producers from potential lawsuits by the descendants of the two men). The film has Holmes visiting Crook in the insane asylum where she is incarcerated – Genevieve Bujold plays Crook in a haunting segment that ends with the normally insouciant Holmes angrily attacking the asylum staff for willfully destroying Crook’s mind. This could be the rare film where Sherlock Holmes loses his temper and acts like a regular Joe instead of his ultra-cool persona.
The film also brings in the character of Robert Lees, the spiritualist who sought to help the police locate Jack the Ripper – Knight cited Lees’ input in his book, and for the film Donald Sutherland offers an appropriately spacey performance as a psychic whose detective abilities are less than satisfactory. Sutherland’s scenes are mostly a detour distraction and could have easily been deleted without disrupting the film’s focus, although as usual Sutherland casually steals scenes without seeming to make a larcenous effort in his acting.
“Murder by Decree” is also the rare film to acknowledge the Goulton Street graffito with its declaration that “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Holmes theorizes the message is not an example of illiterate anti-Semitism but a message related to Freemasonry, and the film’s conclusion has Holmes revealing the conspiracy of Freemasons including Prime Minister Lord Salisbury (a heavily bearded John Gielgud) as part of the network designed to protect the royal family from scandal by arranging for the murders of Whitechapel prostitutes who are aware of the secret that could destroy the kingdom from within.
(To be frank, it is a bit strange to see a film made in 1979 that traffics in anti-Freemason conspiracy theories. But, hey, it happened.)
But while the Holmes of “Murder by Decree” denounces the aristocratic elite for bringing terror and misery to its people, he follows the lead of the Holmes from “A Study in Terror” by keeping the secrets of the upper classes to himself. The Holmes of this film displays his disgust at the excesses of the ruling class, but he is not the modern warrior to bring it down – which, of course, makes sense, as that would involve the creation of an alternative universe in lieu of established history.
To his credit, director Bob Clark and his production team perfectly recreated the dreariness of Ripper-era Whitechapel without relying on excessive fog or distressed damsels constantly looking over their shoulders. Unlike “A Study in Terror,” the women of “Murder by Decree” closely resemble the wretched poor of that distant time and place – and Susan Clark’s transformation into Mary Kelly is a testament to the actress’ dramatic skills and the genius of the film’s hair, make-up and costuming experts.
“Murder by Decree” generated mixed reviews and decent (if not overwhelming) box office returns – the film was more popular in Canada (thanks to having local talent Christopher Plummer, Donald Sutherland and Susan Clark plus director Bob Clark) than in the United States. To date, it remains the last film that put Sherlock Holmes in pursuit of Jack the Ripper – and it is hard to imagine that enterprising filmmakers won’t pair this unlikely duo again in the near future.