I am not as much of a reader as I would like to be. I am one of those who finds a million excuses to not sit down and read, always finding jobs I feel need doing first. However, back in March, with lockdown imminent, I popped into Waterstones to do my own version of bulk buying and not the toilet and pasta kind. Yep, I bulk bought books. I decided to add to my growing Stephen King collection, because what woman in horror doesn’t love a good book from ‘The King’ of horror? I picked up a couple of other books that looked interesting and up my street, and then as I went to checkout my eye was drawn to a book spotlighted in the new releases section. That book was entitled The Five. Written by Hallie Rubenhold, a bestselling and award-winning social historian, and I started reading it as soon as I got home. The Five seeks to explore the lives of the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. (Canonical meaning having the same qualities; in this case the five victims were murdered in a similar pattern or what the police called MO, modus operandi. This is what links victims to a particular killer.)
Jack the Ripper, a name everyone knows, but who he was, nobody knows. Jack is the most famous serial killer throughout history, his crimes are known all over the world, the names of his victims are known by only a few. Their professions however, we know.. prostitution, or so we are led to believe. This is the question that Rubenhold seeks to answer with The Five. Rubenhold seeks to take the focus away from Jack and place the spotlight on the women who made him famous. Serial killers often kill in order to seek fame and infamy and this likely started with Jack, a man who haunted Victorian London during the autumn of 1888. He was this mysterious figure killing women in a horrific manner around Whitechapel and after taunting police with letters before he suddenly disappeared. He was never found, his identity never revealed and these women never saw justice. Yet it is this unknown figure that people fixate on, so much so that some people study him intently attempting to figure out his true identity. The one thing we do know are the names and identities of his five canonical victims, but that’s about all we know, their names. Rubenhold turns the spotlight onto these women, delving into their history and telling their tales. Tales full of love, heartache, marriage, children and rock bottom despair. These women were daughters, wives, sisters and mothers who had their lives ripped away from them in a manner almost unspeakable.
For a historical book of fact The Five is written in a way that reads almost as a tale of fiction. Rubenhold’s way of writing prose is exceptional as she seeks to describe the grimy and downtrodden world of Victorian London.
“The broken pavements, dim gaslights, the slicks of sewage, stagnant pools of disease-breeding water and rubbish-filled roadways foretold of the physical horrors of what lay within the buildings.”
The descriptions are so well written it becomes a story that you are drawn towards these characters and makes you want to keep reading to discover the gruesome outcome, even though we already know it. You become drawn into these characters and their lives to a point where you almost forget you are reading a book of real-life events.
So if you are a fan of true crime, a Victorian era aficionado or are interested in discovering more about Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane and the lives they led up until they landed in the clutches of a mad man, then this is the book for you. Mystery, intrigue, historical accuracy, drama and texture, it has it all and will leave you wondering whether these women were in fact prostitutes, or just given that label by the press for a better story.
Rubenhold’s way of writing prose is exceptional
Book Title: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper
Book Description: The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Book Author: Hallie Rubenhold
Book Format: Paperback
Publisher - Orgnization: Transworld Publishers Ltd
Publisher Logo: 
Date published: January 30, 2020
ISBN: 9781784162344
Number Of Pages: 432
Gemma is fairly new to writing and the film industry, but it has been a long-held passion since she was a child. After several years of working in business, she left to pursue her long-held dreams of writing and making movies. After writing, and directing her first short in 2018 she quickly gained the bug and hasn’t stopped since. That first short went on to win multiple awards in the USA and was quickly followed by a second short which went on to do even better than the first. Since then Gemma has been focusing on her writing and developing several television shows. She is looking to add to her writing by delving into books as well as news and blog posts, and unleashing her creativity, knowledge and imagination to a whole new world.
