Trow is featured on the Discovery Channel program “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed,” which I saw in December; the show is based on Trow’s book “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009; distributed in the U.S. by Casemate Publishing), which I have just finished and also recommend. Here’s why …

Students of philosophy know the concept of “Occam’s razor”: Named for the medieval English Franciscan friar William of Occam, the “razor” – designed to cut through baloney in any era – is defined by our friends at Merriam-Webster as “a scientific and philosophic rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.” Put more simply: Don’t reach for a complicated answer to a problem when there’s a simpler explanation available; or, as medical school students have been taught for generations: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

In “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer,” Mei Trow has done just that: waded into the morass of Ripper lore – rife with and blind alleys and “red herrings” (a favorite term among the Ripperologists, I note) – and come up with a logical suspect for the murders who was, unfortunately, written off as a mental incompetent and subsequently ignored at the outset of the original investigation.

That man was Robert Mann, a workhouse inmate who not only lived in the very part of London where most of the murders occurred but was employed as an attendant in the mortuary that served that area of the metropolis: Therefore, as a matter of procedure, Ripper’s gruesome handiwork would be brought to Mann’s workplace for forensic medical examination. Mann was not a doctor – far from it: His job was to unlock the morgue and take receipt of the bodies that the police brought in at all hours of the day and night. Like the eponymous Dr. Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant, Fritz, in the original 1931 film, he would have done the heavy lifting for the investigating physician: washed the corpses, helped hoist them onto and off the slab, held the specimen jars waiting to be filled, cleaned up the mess afterward … In that capacity, he would also have observed trained surgeons at work, incidentally gaining some anatomical knowledge. And he would have had ready access to sharp instruments.

Mann would also have been called to the stand at inquests. This struck me as odd, and I asked Trow about it in my original interview last year on AmeriCollector.com (“The Ripper reexamined,” Dec. 30, 2009): Would his responsibilities in a mortuary gone beyond moving corpses around and cleaning up? Trow replied: “We know … that he was trusted to go out of the workhouse to collect corpses, so he is not merely ‘moving bodies around’ in the confines of his own mortuary. Anyone connected with the deceased, from relatives and friends to any eyewitnesses, the police and auxiliary staff (e.g., Mann), would be called to an inquest as a matter of routine.” In fact, Mann was called to testify at the first two Ripper inquests but was written off as disoriented and incoherent and therefore an unreliable witness.

In other words, while Londoners lived in fear of – and London’s finest frantically searched for – a babbling maniac (the “disorganized killer” of modern police parlance), the authorities actually dismissed the very first babbling maniac they encountered: one who could look forward to being physically close to his victims again and again and again.

Certainly, with over a century of criminological advances to draw on – including the relatively recent observation that serial murderers operate close to where they live and/or work – Trow can take the long view of the Whitechapel murders in identifying Mann as the killer, which he admits may never be proven conclusively. Nonetheless, the Ripperological community is a meticulous one: While police blunders are often cited, it’s interesting to note not only that no one has proposed Mann as a possible perp till now – I mean, why not check out EVERYONE with a tangible connection to the crimes, instead of Freemasons and Queen Victoria’s nephew? – but that Ripper investigators through the years have suffered from the same nearsightedness as Jack’s contemporary pursuers. It took Trow, wielding Occam’s discerning blade, to finger Mann as a geographically logical choice; as someone who would know bureaucratic procedure well enough to anticipate reunions with his victims in his morgue; and who would benefit, intentionally or not, by acting naturally when investigators shined their light on him, earning him his “REJECTED” stamp early on and enabling him to “hide in plain sight” from then on.

It’s not a novel concept, only one that’s newly and elegantly applied to the world’s most enduring murder mystery. Trow himself noted in our December interview that “the idea of a disturbed mortuary attendant first surfaced in the profiling carried on in 1988 by John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.” He also recounts in “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” how David Canter, author of “Mapping Murder: The Secrets of Geographical Profiling” (Virgin Books), once submitted a screenplay to a film company “in which the offender was as banal as his motive”: “It was turned down, said the company, because ‘the audience would feel cheated by such a denouement. They would want to learn that it was all even more complicated than they could have imagined, not less so.’ And so it is with Jack. This does an appalling disservice to the truth. Murder is very rarely exotic and conspiratorial; the only thing that is bizarre about serial killers is the crimes they commit. Everything else IS ordinary” (emphasis in the original).

Historians – and, I think, collectors as hobbyists and as “history detectives” – can greatly benefit from the levelheadedness of Trow’s work. You may not agree with his conclusion that Robert Mann was responsible for the “ ’orrible murders” in London in 1888 and possibly a couple more in 1889, but you’ll learn a thing or two from his mind-set and methodology, such as trying to get into another person’s frame of mind, accepting that people are usually guided by commonplace motives and, certainly, that they often make simple yet enduring mistakes. Fiddle with the key words in an eBay search, or type in common misspellings for a personal name, and you may well be rewarded with an item that other people miss; imagine where a folder may “logically” be misfiled and you may unearth information that has been long lost to other researchers.

This is a good, fast read that, thankfully, forgoes the usual lurid police photographs of the victims, which are on any number of Web sites anyway. Give “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” a try, and mind those hoofbeats …

Photos from “Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer” courtesy of M. J. Trow

Have you read "Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer"? We welcome your impressions of Mei Trow's book. Please post here or send them, along with a line or two about yourself, to LetsCollect@AmeriCollector.com.

JACK THE RIPPER: QUEST FOR A KILLER

“The Exorcist” scared the bejesus out of me as well, but forget the demonic possession – forget, even, the fashionable Northwest vampires: “Victim Six” (Pinnacle), a novel about serial murder by Gregg Olsen, is one book that will remind you just how much fun a great read really is. A New York Times best-selling true-crime writer based in Olalla, Wash., Olsen knows enough about the evil that men (and women, too, dearies) do in real life not to have to resort to the supernatural to know exactly how to creep you out. After all, he IS originally from Seattle …

Full disclosure: I have the honor of knowing Olsen and read “Victim Six” in manuscript; in fact, I did the initial copyedit on his request (for which I got paid seven big ones), since I copyedit manuscripts for New York trade book publishers for a living. In fact, I read the manuscript TWICE and I can tell you: There are short books that are almost torture to work on, and longer books that pull you right into the story. “Victim Six” was the latter: a compelling mystery with solid, three-dimensional characters, both likable and hateful; dialog that rings true; and a credible storyline … In other words, EXACTLY the kind of novel that made me want to get a job in book publishing in the first place.

As Roald Dahl once said of good children’s books and good ghost stories, good murder novels are “damnably difficult to write.” I know because I’m paid to work on quite a few of them, and even some of the really good ones are good only up until the point where the plot falls apart – the psychopathic sex murderer turns out to be a federal judge, or the ambassador to Liechtenstein, or a nuclear scientist working on the government’s biggest secret weapon, so the Pentagon is covering up his crimes; or else he (or increasingly she: THERE’S politically correctness running amuck!) has some incredibly goofy motive for killing – leaving the reader feeling thoroughly ripped off.

Well, with “Victim Six,” you’ll feel anything but. I won’t go beyond that, except to say that if you live in the Puget Sound area or are from this neck of the woods, “Victim Six” will impress you as a very “Northwest” thriller; if you have no connection with Washington State and don’t yet know Olsen’s work, you’ll soon discover why he is so popular. He knows how to tell a real good story.

WARNING: AmeriCollector.com does not encourage reading “Victim Six” on a Kindle wireless reading device or in book form while driving or as a passenger if you are given to sudden frightened outbursts that can startle or distract the driver. Do not read “Victim Six” aloud to small children, raging-hormone-charged teens or your wimpy significant other as a bedtime story. Read responsibly.

“Victim Six” shipped to bookstores on Jan. 26 and goes on sale in February. Learn more about Gregg Olsen by visiting his Web site: www.GreggOlsen.com. Meet the author himself at one of his upcoming bookstore appearances:

• Sat., Jan. 30, at 3 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, Silverdale, Wash.
• Tues., Feb. 2, at 6 p.m.: Bethel Avenue Books, Port Orchard, Wash.
• Sat., Feb. 6, at noon: Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Seattle, Wash.
• Sat., Feb. 6, at 3:30 p.m.: Borders, Gig Harbor, Wash.
• Thurs., Feb. 11, at 10 a.m.: Mystery Book Club Read, Liberty Bay Books, Poulsbo, Wash.
• Thurs., Feb. 11, “drive-by” signing: Powell’s, Beaverton, Ore.
• Thurs., Feb. 11, at 7 p.m.: Murder by the Book, Portland, Ore.
• Fri., Feb. 12, at 6:30 p.m.: Tea Party Bookshop, Salem, Ore.
• Sat., Feb. 13, at noon: North by Northwest, Lincoln City, Ore.

Purchase Victim Six, by Gregg Olsen! Amazon.com

Chinese workers were instrumental in the construction of the nation’s transcontinental railroads in the 1860s and ’70s. By the early 1880s, however, the major railroad lines were nearing completion, and Chinese laborers were moving to the cities of the West to find other work, according to Ed Echtle, a Pacific Northwest historian specializing in Asian immigration. As other immigrant groups arrived from Europe, the competition for labor intensified. Unions began to organize unskilled workers and tapped into their aversion to the Chinese.

Anti-Chinese discrimination became federal policy in 1882 when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first U.S. immigration law designed to bar a specific nationality.

The Chinese became kind of a scapegoat for low wages because they were charged with working for less, undercutting white labor,” Echtle said. “And then in the 1880s there was an economic downturn, which sort of exacerbated things, so that the Exclusion Act was a political response to the pressure from constituents to ban unskilled Chinese labor from coming in to compete with white labor.

Yet, it was not all about labor and wages: Newspapers at the time alluded to foreign heathenism, to rats and squalor in the Chinese sections of towns, to foul smells that nauseated patrons at neighboring white businesses, to opium use and prostitution. A spark was being struck, and many Tacomans – from underemployed railroad and mill workers to smug storekeepers and social-climbing politicos – were eager to grab torches.

On Sept. 28, at an anti-Chinese rally in Seattle, it was resolved that the Chinese had to get out of Washington Territory by Nov. 1, and white-owned businesses were called upon to dismiss their Chinese employees. In Tacoma, where only a few people (Washington pioneer Ezra Meeker was one) spoke out against the agitators or defied their demands to fire their Chinese workers, about 450 Chinese boarded trains or ships or left by other means; the remaining 200 were marched out to Lake View on Nov 4. Historian Murray Morgan in his book “Puget’s Sound” described the procession: “Teamsters cracked their whips, the wagons lurched forward. The elderly and the sick Chinese were permitted to ride. The rest trudged after the wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold rain, duffle slung on poles over their shoulders or in laundry bags on their backs. Their sandals sucked mud; some took them off and went barefoot. Many were crying. Armed whites on horseback rode beside the refugees, herding them like cattle, and a guard of club-carrying whites brought up the rear, urging on the stragglers.”

They spent a miserable night, some in the station waiting room, where there was a single stove, others in freight sheds. According to Jules Alexander Karlin in a 1954 article in Pacific Historical Review the Chinese would maintain that the ordeal drove one woman, a merchant’s wife, insane, and that two of their number later died from their prolonged exposure to the weather.

Two days later, arsonists set fire to the vacated Chinese shops and dwellings of Little Canton. Tacoma’s Chinese community was effectively erased.

* * * * *

Tacoma was by no means the only American city to evict its Chinese residents; in fact, as University of Delaware professor Jean Pfaelzer reveals in her book “Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans” (hardcover published by Random House in 2007; paperback published by University of California Press in 2008), there were nearly 200 expulsions of Chinese populations from American communities in the American West and Northwest from the early 1850s to 1906.

White Protestant nativists – as well as immigrants whom the nativists vilified – were vocal in their objections to Chinese living in their midst, even as the latter were helping to build the railroads, working as launderers and domestics and laboring in mines, in canneries, in logging camps and on ranches. Notes Pfaelzer, “The white man’s racial rhetoric was, in fact, about himself: the Chinese worked too many hours; the Chinese worker was drugged on opium; the Chinese worker was slovenly; the Chinese debased the town and created the need for civic jobs; the Chinese ate rats; the Chinese were renters; the Chinese lived in overcrowded housing; the Chinese demanded the right to own property; the Chinese were expected to send scarce money back to their homeland. The Chinese were also derided as “sojourners,” people with unbreakable ties with their empire across the ocean and incapable of assimilating and becoming good, loyal American citizens – even if white Americans would have them. The assaults on life, liberty and property that resulted from this mind-set ranged from the spontaneous to the systematic: from armed gangs of resentful white prospectors evicting their Chinese counterparts from the California gold fields, to average citizens joining in boycotts to deprive their resident “celestials” of their livelihoods.

For example, in Eureka, Calif., in early 1885, an unfortunate incident in which a city councilman was shot to death during a dispute between two Chinese turned into an excuse for vigilantes to round up more than 300 Chinese residents, imprison them in warehouses, then force them onto ships bound for San Francisco. The eviction conducted in Washington Territory in November of that year would follow Eureka’s model.

By contrast, in late 1885 and early 1886, the white citizens of Truckee, Calif., sought a more peaceful means of expulsion by boycotting Chinese businesses and those that employed Chinese workers. Never mind the fact that Truckee’s Chinese were “renters, shoppers, and low-paid laborers, and white agents made money from their legal, real estate, and commercial transactions,” and that “seemingly, this interracial relationship benefited everyone,” writes Pfaelzer: The so-called Truckee Method, while slower than the Eureka Method, achieved the same goal.

Pfaelzer’s scholarship is exemplary, not just because it reveals that expulsions of Chinese were common exercises in ethnic cleansing – rather than just a few isolated incidents – in small towns and large over a period of more than 50 years, but because most of this information was there all along for the sifting, in newspaper accounts and public documents. No newly uncovered treasure trove of documents, no long-buried diaries suddenly brought to light: Rather, Pfaelzer took what others missed and added an essential and long-overdue chapter to our nation’s past.

But Pfaelzer gives us much more than a litany of shameful events: She shows that beleaguered Chinese were willing to stand up for themselves by using the legal system to sue for reparations, by testifying to the injustices that they were subjected to, by striking for fair wages and refusing to supply goods to hostile businesses – even purchasing arms to defend their homes and their lives. Certainly, the Chinese understood the rights and duties that American citizenship entailed; what they were denied was the paperwork that would give them that legal status.

Purchase Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans