This is my lunchtime reading today. I always look forward to new books by Dr John for their entertainment value, if not their accuracy. This is, I believe, his fourth publication and it is, by far, his best --- although that’s not saying much. He seems to be using a word processor now, but that still hasn’t prevented numerous spelling mistakes and typographical errors. My copy has an inscription that is indecipherable except for the word “wishes”, and a flourish-filled two-line signature.
The less said about the text, the better. He continues to make major factual errors about all of the WMs. He can’t even locate the murder sites accurately; for example, he says that 29 Hanbury is on the south side of the street. And there is information here that some of us have never heard before: Elizabeth Stride’s murderer was claimed, by a shop girl, to be “a tall chap with glasses and a van dyke beard who carried a black case”; the constable who discovered the GSG was sacked, probably because “it was decided that he wrote it himself”; and “Elizabeth Mackenzi” had two stab wounds on either side of her Virginia (which may explain why Stephen Ryder moved to Florida). It goes on and on.
I may be back to say some more about this later, but I’ll have to stop laughing first.
The less said about the text, the better. He continues to make major factual errors about all of the WMs. He can’t even locate the murder sites accurately; for example, he says that 29 Hanbury is on the south side of the street. And there is information here that some of us have never heard before: Elizabeth Stride’s murderer was claimed, by a shop girl, to be “a tall chap with glasses and a van dyke beard who carried a black case”; the constable who discovered the GSG was sacked, probably because “it was decided that he wrote it himself”; and “Elizabeth Mackenzi” had two stab wounds on either side of her Virginia (which may explain why Stephen Ryder moved to Florida). It goes on and on.
I may be back to say some more about this later, but I’ll have to stop laughing first.
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