Tangled Web UK Review April 2008
The Fox and the Flies: The Criminal World of the Whitechapel Murderer by
Charles van Onselen
pbk out March 08
(Vintage)
at £9.99
This volume is a historical study of the criminal career of Joseph Silver, pimp, brothel-keeper, gun-runner, and sometime police informer. He was born in Kielce, Poland, in 1868, and had a troubled relationship with his mother which may have been the origin of his lifelong misogyny. He was certainly unable to form a close emotional bond with a woman, was bisexual, and married three prostitutes. Silver left Poland for London in 1885, destined for a peripatetic existence. Over the next thirty-odd years he made his living from prostitution in London, New York, Pittsburgh, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kimberley, Windhoek, Paris, Aachen, Valparaíso, Rio de Janeiro, and Jaroslaw - amongst other places.
His brothels were particularly prolific in America and South Africa, and he was a conspicuous figure in the underworld - and also employed as a police agent - in both countries. Silver met his match in a young State Attorney by the name of Jan Smuts, who broke his hold over the Johannesburg vice trade shortly before the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. Silver moved to Windhoek, in German South West Africa, where his failure to grasp the Teutonic resistance to corruption resulted in his imprisonment in Schleswig-Holstein in 1908. It was an incarceration from which he never recovered. The First World War presented him with numerous opportunities to rebuild his empire, but he failed to reproduce his previous successes, and his luck ran out when he was shot as a spy in 1918.
Although Silver had a reputation in the underworld, and was known to the press, he lacked the physical courage and leadership ability to attain lasting notoriety. The Fox and the Flies is thus a remarkably thorough biography of a shadowy and complex individual, written in a meticulous, clear, and non-judgemental manner. A problem arises in that such a detailed analysis of an essentially grubby persona is of limited interest, and perhaps restricted to historians and other academics. The author appears to have attempted to bring his work to a wider audience by advancing Silver as a suspect for the Whitechapel murders of 1888.
Mr van Onselen follows the rigorous research of Silver’s life and times with a speculative and conjectural argument for his identity as the Ripper. His hypothesis is based on three premises: Silver was in the East End of London in 1888, and subsequently tried to hide this from the authorities, Silver was obsessed with the Book of Ezekiel, Silver was neurosyphilitic, and displayed psychopathic traits. As is so often the case with Ripper theories, there are more obvious interpretations of the evidence: Silver spent most of his life involved in deception and concealment, he was Semitic, but despised devout Jews, and is an unlikely candidate for a homicidal zealot targeting sinners, Silver was one of many of his contemporaries who may or may not have been psychopaths. None of these provide evidence that he was a murderer, let alone the Ripper. Where the rest of the chapters are arranged chronologically, the one on Whitechapel comes at the end - and has a ‘tacked-on’ feel to it.
Those who have a serious interest in the fin de siecle underworld and international criminal networks will find The Fox and the Flies a distinguished, in-depth study, and a remarkable bargain for a six hundred and seventy-two page volume. Those seeking the identity of Jack the Ripper should look elsewhere.
(
Rafe McGregor
Rafe's own site - www.rafemcgregor.co.uk)
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