Portrait of a Killer by
Patricia Cornwell
hbk out February 02
Published by Little Brown
at £16.99
I'd seen the documentary of the book – in which Cornwell slashes a carcass dressed in a frock
to demonstrate scientific method – so didn't come to this with a completely open mind. But,
unlike many reviewers, I'm indifferent to her wealth, her politics or her sexuality. A book
should rise or fall by its own merits and not by the reviewer's prejudices or jealousy.
So is this a groundbreaking book? No, but it's a historically detailed one which gives a strong
sense of the period. The author also paints a vivid picture of Jack The Ripper's impoverished
victims, forced to wear every garment they owned for fear of theft. Their prematurely missing
teeth and indifferent hygiene tell of a pitiless age without affordable medical or social care.
Patricia Cornwell has spent millions of dollars researching her subject, has accessed Scotland
Yard's data on the Ripper and visited key sites and places where her suspect, Walter Sickert,
may have lived.
Sickert was one of the most famous artists of his day and she describes how some of his
paintings uncannily reflect Ripper-like victims. This despite the fact that most of the victims
were not available for public view. She suggests that he was a sociopath who killed these
women because he could not fulfil his desires due to a genital abnormality.
But the book is subtitled Jack The Ripper – Case Closed and it is here that it falls down as
there are sufficient contradictions for the case to remain wide open. She suspects that Sickert
was unable to have sex but admits elsewhere that one of his three wives divorced him for
adultery. He was rumoured to have a mistress and apparently believed he had a sexually
transmitted disease. The author tries to get round these problems by suggesting that adultery
was the easiest fault for a divorcing couple to cite – and she says that Sickert might have
feared he'd become diseased by being splashed with tainted blood.
Sickert's alleged serial murders also sit badly with his creativity since successful, creative
people are unlikely to annihilate threadbare victims. Yet Cornwell is unflinching in her
judgement, stating 'I know the identity of a murderer' and 'Murder is not a mystery and it is
my mission to fight it with my pen.'
It's this grandiosity which stopped me identifying with her viewpoint – though I still felt
compelled to read to the very end.
The Ripper's letters to the police stopped in 1896 when Sickert was 35 and he didn't die until
1942 when he was age 81. This suggests that he wasn't Jack The Ripper as a serial killer
rarely stops killing when he's at the height of his destructive powers.
I enjoyed this book but would have liked to know much more about Walter Sickert and would
have preferred the less libellous title Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man.
Portrait of a Killer by
Patricia Cornwell
