At What Point Is It Cool to Name Your Restaurant after a Serial Killer?

True Crime Fiction goes to London (Part 1)

While making our way to the start point of the Jack the Ripper walking tour we had booked for our second night in London, my partner asked me if there were any other murderers around whom such a tourism megacomplex had developed.¹ This question dovetailed nicely with a cafe we passed a block or so from the High Street alley where we met our guide.

Tempting, but no. (Tripadvisor.com)

What is it about Jack the Ripper that makes this not just okay but sort of charming? I mean, can you imagine a similar pun made about Bundy, Dahmer, or Gacy? (Don’t answer that.)²

As we walked the streets of Whitechapel, our guide kept up a steady stream of polished patter. He clearly knew his stuff (more on that later), and enhanced the locations that had been destroyed or heavily altered with vivid descriptions, while making the most of the several buildings that were virtually identical to how they looked in the summer of 1888. As we made our way through the neighborhood, we were also making our way through the five victims who were brutally murdered that August. We don’t know much about the killer, and the tour attempts to compensate for that lack of knowledge with gruesome details about, and photographs of, the bodies of the women he killed.

Having read The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, Hallie Rubenhold’s essential history, I figured I would be this tour’s worst nightmare. However, the guide got very little wrong about the women’s biographical details (including avoiding the common error of deeming them all sex workers). Unfortunately, he also left very little out about the violence done to their bodies, imparting dramatic narration and projecting crime scene and autopsy photographs that focused our eyes and ears on the horrific injuries and mutilations visited upon the women’s throats, gut, and guts.³ This is not what we mean when we talk about centering the victim.⁴

Which brings me back to my titular question. At what point did Jack the Ripper and his crimes become a menacing but fascinating bit of local color? When do butchered bodies become a tourist attraction? As the tour was concluding and our guide began offering up his book on the murders and merch pamphlet for sale, I began to get a sense of what’s happened to this crime and criminal.

Well, of course we bought them . . .

for the same reason we bought these.

The exit through the gift shop structure of the tour, along with our guide’s Victorian-adjacent topcoat and boots, framed this experience as almost identical to the one we had visiting the Sherlock Holmes museum earlier that day. The period costuming, winking references to the main characters as if they might appear at any moment, and commitment to historical immersion were all there. However, in the case of Sherlock, we were all pretending he was real (the guide even joked that he could have solved the Jack the Ripper case), and in the case of Jack, we were in some sense pretending he wasn’t.

Dr. Chris Bell, scholar, screenwriter, and TED Talker extraordinaire, investigates how and why certain historical figures transcend their individual specificity in order to do foundational cultural work. In his astute analysis of the musical Hamilton, this process is a positive one, creating space for marginalized and oppressed Americans to claim their previously denied place in the mythology of the country’s founding. According to Bell, the production makes

the choice to see the “Founders” not as real historical figures but as characters in a myth. Because the characters are characters, they are then unbound from historicity. . . . If one then changes the way the characters look, so that the characters now look like Black and Brown people, it allows Black and Brown audiences to get past what the historical figures looked like to focus on the story itself.

This “cosmogonic” mythmaking, creating and adapting a story designed to explain “the creation of order within worlds,” (re)organizes a culture’s structure, values, and practices. In this case, storytelling about the character of “Jack the Ripper” (rather than the human being who took a knife to five women) seems to be bolstering these precepts not by explaining order, but rather by mythologizing chaos. Typically, crime fiction is understood to “bring order and justice to a chaotic world.”⁵ Both the idea (theoretically) and the praxis (literally) of Jack the Ripper embodies chaos. His crime was to disorder and distort the human body. By containing Jack within a narrative—a movie, a comic, a tour—we can tell the story of a social world that identifies, condemns, and repudiates chaos.

But that process could arguably be applied to any criminal. So what is it about Jack in particular that enables and facilitates this process? The temporal separation certainly helps. Much like with the Medieval Murder Map, deaths lose a bit of their sting when we’re decades or centuries distant from them. The killer’s anonymity also contributes, I think. There’s nothing like a cold case to both encourage intense engagement with violence while at the same time allowing for critical detachment from the actual perpetrator. And of course branding helps. Jack the Ripper sounds like a villain from a scary story,⁶ and if it’s just a story, or a myth, we can be frightened, entertained, and ultimately safe.

And none of this is to dunk on the tour, or true crime tours in general.⁷ As I realized touring the Williams-Mercer house in Savannah, every true crime tour is a new true crime narrative, and some of them are more empathetic, contextualized, and thoughtful than others. I would love to see more true crime scholarship about these constantly evolving theatrical, mythmaking texts.

1. At the time I came up blank, but I’m sorry to report that further research confirms there are multiple Manson Family Murder Tours.

2. Okay, maybe answer that.

3. This feature of the tour is, amazingly, described in marketing materials as “Ripper Vision,” essentially putting the members of the tour in the subject position of the killer.

4. I cannot take credit for this excellent joke, made by my cleverer friend over text when I was critiquing the tour.

5. from Gene D. Phillips’s Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir.

6. FYI for those not steeped in this lore, the name came from a series of missives, the first known as the “Dear Boss” letter, that were signed “Jack the Ripper.” They are most likely hoaxes, but we all know how far unhinged letters and a creepy name can go towards establishing hype.

7. If you’re going to be in London anytime soon, this is the one we took. We saw at least five other groups while we were strolling the streets, so there are certainly many options out there, but our guide actually wrote a/the book on the crimes. Oh yes, I’m going to read it.