Mina Mathers is still alive, the head of the occult order, the Alpha et Omega, which she runs from a magic shop near the British Library, with the assistance of her devoted acolyte Walter Wellbeloved, now in his mid-seventies and still mourning his beloved mermaid.
Tom Norman is still alive, too. It seems that he did not leave England as he had planned, but moved across London from Whitechapel to Croydon, where he married a music-hall artiste named Amy and together, in short order, they had six sons and four daughters. The last I heard of him, he had opened an exhibition in the seaside resort of Margate, with, as his star attraction, Phoebe the Strange Girl.
Willie Wilde married his fiancée, Lily Lees, that January, as planned. Oscar did not attend the wedding. Oscar’s friend, the writer and caricaturist, Max Beerbohm, said of Willie: ‘Quel monstre! Dark, oily, suspect yet awfully like Oscar: he has Oscar’s coy, carnal smile & fatuous giggle, & not a little of Oscar’s esprit. But he is awful – a veritable tragedy of family-likeness.’ In July 1895, Willie and Lily had their only child, Dolly. Within four years, Willie was dead. He was aged forty-six. It was the drink that killed him.
‘Do you think Willie died happy?’ Oscar asked, when I saw him for the last time. This was in Paris, early in 1900. Before I could answer my friend’s question, he did so himself. (Towards the end, that was his style.) ‘Probably not,’ he said, ‘although perhaps he should have done. Giving a name to Jack the Ripper has turned a monster into a myth – and a myth that will last longer than any that I have created.’ He looked up from his glass of absinthe and smiled at me. His teeth were green and jagged, but there was a sweetness to his smile. ‘Now your Sherlock Holmes, Arthur, he will stand the test of time . . . What was there in the fog of London in those glory days of ours that enabled us to create these mythic figures? You conjured up Holmes – and Moriarty. People love a villain, don’t they? Bram created Dracula. Robert Louis Stevenson produced Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – though, for the life of me, I never could remember which of the two of them was the evil one.’ He laughed wheezily. ‘I had a letter not long ago from your young friend James Barrie. He’s writing a play about a boy who never grows up. I like the idea of that, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘Will you write the story of Jack the Ripper, Arthur? “It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crimes . . .” That was to be the opening line, remember?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘Oh do,’ he pressed me. ‘I told the story to another writer the other day – a Polish fellow I met here in Paris, shy but very charming. We had a pleasant evening, drinking together and exchanging stories. He said, with my permission, he might use parts of it one day.* Ours is a generation of myth-makers, Arthur – the last of a kind. You must write about Jack the Ripper, Arthur. Tell me you will.’
‘Jack the Ripper is not a myth,’ I said. ‘He was real.’
‘Yes,’ said Oscar. ‘And we knew him.’
For a few minutes, we talked about those January days and nights when we breakfasted together at the Langham and walked the streets of Whitechapel side by side – as Holmes and Watson might have done.
There was a question that I wanted to ask him, and I began to – but when I discovered that, until I reminded him, he had forgotten the names of Ostrog and Kosminski, I realised there was no point.
Besides, I knew the answer to my question. The last victim of Jack the Ripper, the girl who had been murdered on that fateful Saturday morning, the thirteenth of January 1894, was Olga – my Olga, my little Russian acrobat. At the time, Oscar told me that the victim had been beheaded because he could not bear to tell me the truth: he had seen her face. He knew that it was Olga.
Oscar told me, too, that when Salazkin had looked at the photograph of my children and had seen the delight the picture gave to Olga, he resented it. Olga was murdered because of the delight she showed in knowing me. I shall not forget her. Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.
* He did. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad was published in 1904.
Praise for Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders
‘One of the most intelligent, amusing and entertaining books of the year. If Oscar Wilde himself had been asked to write this book he could not have done it any better’ Alexander McCall Smith
‘Wilde has sprung back to life in this thrilling and richly atmospheric new novel’ Sunday Express
‘Gyles Brandreth and Oscar Wilde seem made for one another ... the complex and nicely structured plot zips along’ Daily Telegraph
‘Brandreth has poured his considerable familiarity with London into a witty fin-de-siècle entertainment, and the rattlingly elegant dialogue is peppered with witticisms uttered by Wilde well before he ever thought of putting them into his plays’ Sunday Times
‘Brandreth knows his Wilde ... He knows his Holmes too ... The plot is devilishly clever, the characters are fully fleshed, the mystery is engrossing, and the solution is perfectly fair. I love it’ Sherlock Holmes Journal
Praise for Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death
‘Hugely enjoyable’ Daily Mail
‘A cast of historical characters to die for’ Sunday Times
‘A carnival of cliff-hangers and fiendish twists-and-turns ... The joy of the book, as with its predecessor, is the rounded and compelling presentation of the character of Wilde’ Sunday Express
‘Wilde really has to prove himself against Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle when a murder ruins their Sunday Supper Club. But Brandreth’s invention – that of Wilde as detective – is more than up to the challenge. With plenty of wit, too’ Daily Mirror
‘I can’t wait until the next one’ Scotsman
Praise for Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile
‘The murders begin. Highly theatrical ones ... An entertaining and meticulously researched piece of pop fiction about Wilde and his circle’ Washington Post
‘An entertaining yarn – easy and pleasing to read – with an extensive set of vivid characters’ Gay Times
‘Very funny’ Independent on Sunday
Praise for Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers
‘Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde murder mysteries get better and better ... Positively dazzling. Both witty and profound, it’s also devilishly clever’ District Messenger, newsletter of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London
Praise for Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders
‘Literary and theological references merge easily into a skilfully crafted story that goes all the way to meet the standards set by his two eminent protagonists’ Daily Mail
‘Hugely enjoyable ... a story that reminds us just how enjoyable a well-told traditional murder mystery can be’ Scotsman
Praise for Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol
‘What sets the novel apart is Brandreth’s talent for conveying time and place. The barbarism of close confinement has rarely been so graphically and movingly portrayed’ Daily Mail
‘The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries just get better and better ... and this is the best so far.’ Sherlock Holmes Journal
Also by Gyles Brandreth
Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders
Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death
Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile
Oscar Wilde and the Nest of Vipers
Oscar Wilde and the Vatican Murders
Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol
Gyles Brandreth
Gyles Brandreth is the President of the Oscar Wilde Society, the editor of the Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (2008) and Beautiful and Impossible Things: Selected Essays of Oscar Wilde (2015), as well as the author of seven murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle and their circle – one of whom was George R. Sims (1847–1922), kinsman of the Empress Eugénie, journalist, playwright and social reformer, who wrote the ballads Billy’s dead and gone to glory and Christmas Day in the workhouse, and was the first journalist to claim to
know the identity of ‘Jack the Ripper. Gyles Brandreth’s great-grandmother was a first cousin of George R. Sims and the present volume owes its revelations to unpublished papers in the Sims archive.
Gyles Brandreth was born in 1948 in Germany, where his father, Charles Brandreth, was serving as a legal officer with the Allied Control Commission and counted among his colleagues H. Montgomery Hyde, who published the first full account of the trials of Oscar Wilde that year. In 1974, Gyles Brandreth produced The Trials of Oscar Wilde (with Tom Baker as Wilde) at the Oxford Theatre Festival and, in 2000, edited the transcripts of the trials for an audio production featuring Martin Jarvis.
Gyles Brandreth was educated at the Lycée Français de Londres, at Betteshanger School in Kent, and at Bedales in Hampshire, where the school’s founder, J. H. Badley (1865–1967), provided him with a series of vivid personal accounts of Oscar Wilde’s conversational style. J. H. Badley knew the Wildes, and their son Cyril was a pupil at Bedales at the time of Oscar’s arrest. Like Montague John Druitt, Gyles Brandreth went to New College, Oxford (where he was a scholar, President of the Union and editor of the university magazine), and then embarked on a career as an author and journalist. His first book was a study of prison reform (Created in Captivity, 1972);his first biography was a portrait of the Victorian music-hall star Dan Leno (The Funniest Man on Earth, 1974). More recently, he has published a biography of Sir John Gielgud, an acclaimed diary of his years as an MP and government whip (Breaking the Code: Westminster Diaries 1990–97) and two best-selling royal biographies: Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage and Charles & Camilla: Portrait of a Love Affair. His diaries covering the years 1959 to 2000 appeared under the title Something Sensational to Read in the Train – a phrase borrowed from The Importance of Being Earnest. He is also the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations and the author of two Sunday Times bestsellers: Word Play and The 7 Secrets of Happiness.
As an actor Gyles Brandreth has appeared in pantomime and Shakespeare, and as Lady Bracknell in a musical adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. As a broadcaster, he has presented numerous series for BBC Radio 4, including A Rhyme in Time, Sound Advice, Wordaholics and Whispers. He has featured on Desert Island Discs and is probably best known as a regular on Just a Minute (Radio 4)and a reporter on The One Show (BBC 1). A regular on the Channel 4 word-game Countdown, his television appearances have ranged from being the guest host of Have I Got News for You to being the subject of This Is Your Life. With Hinge & Bracket he scripted the TV series Dear Ladies; with Julian Slade he wrote a play about A. A. Milne (featuring the young Aled Jones as Christopher Robin); and with Susannah Pearse he has written a play about Lewis Carroll and the actress Isa Bowman. Gyles Brandreth is married to the writer and publisher Michèle Brown, and they have three children – a barrister, a writer and an environmental economist – and seven grandchildren.
Oscar Wilde died in a small, first-floor room at L’Hôtel d’Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts, in Paris, at approximately 1.45 p.m. on 30 November 1900. One hundred years later, at the same time, on the same date, in the same room, Gyles and Michèle Brandreth were among a small group who gathered to mark the centenary of his passing and to honour a most remarkable man, whose greatest play, according to Frank Harris, was his own life: ‘a five-act tragedy with Greek implications, and he was its most ardent spectator. In 2010, Gyles Brandreth unveiled the plaque commemorating the first meeting of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle at the Langham Hotel, London.
In 2015, at the Langham Hotel, Gyles Brandreth hosted a reception at which HRH the Duchess of Cornwall unveiled a bronze head of Oscar Wilde sculpted by the young English sculptor James Matthews. Before the unveiling, the actor Rupert Everett read from The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gyles Brandreth explained that everyone in the room had a connection with Oscar – some, like Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson, obviously so; others, like the Duchess of Cornwall, less obviously.
In fact, the Duchess of Cornwall, born Camilla Shand, is the great-granddaughter of Alec Shand (1858–1936), whose intellectual legacy is his work as a pioneer in the field of social psychology. In 1914 he published The Foundations of Character, Being a Study of the Tendencies of the Emotions and Sentiments.
In her speech at the Langham Hotel in 2015, the Duchess of Cornwall began by quoting Wilde’s line, ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about’, adding that it is one of the few maxims of his that she is not sure she would entirely agree with. She then explained her family connection with Wilde: ‘My great-grandfather, Alec Shand, an intellectual who moved in both Bohemian and radical circles, was introduced by his sister, Bessie, to one of her friends, a beautiful, chestnut-haired, intellectually gifted woman named Constance Lloyd. They became secretly engaged, but, sadly, nobody knows why, or when, one of them broke it off. Constance went on to marry Oscar in 1887. The rest, as they say, is history.’ She added, with Wilde’s grandson in her line of sight: ‘Oscar Wilde said, “The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it”; but if this particular piece of history had been re-written, I know that two people in this room would not be here today!’
OSCAR WILDE AND THE RETURN OF JACK THE RIPPER
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Gyles Brandreth
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition April 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: is available
ISBN: 978-1-64313-021-7
ISBN: 978-1-64313-122-1 (ebk.)
Distributed by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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