Overview

WINNER - BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2015, Jack the Ripper Conference, Nottingham, England. Will Jack the Ripper ever be identified? The answer is an emphatic No. But not because he was a quasi-supernatural entity able to perform lightning-fast kerb-side surgery whilst running split-second rings around two London police forces. Jack the Ripper did not exist - except within the minds of his creators and those who for one reason or another have attempted for over one hundred years to turn the myth into a reality. In 1976 Simon Daryl Wood revealed Stephen Knight's hugely popular Royal Conspiracy to be a farrago of nonsense, and since then has written extensively on the Whitechapel Murders. Deconstructing Jack: The Secret History of the Whitechapel Murders, the result of over twenty years' research, casts a sceptical eye over the continuous stream of lies, invention, misinformation, self-publicity and opportunism which has kept this Victorian bogeyman alive in the darkest reaches of our 21st Century imaginations. Can history ever bring itself to shrug off almost 130 years of dogma and cherished beliefs, and at last smile ruefully at having been suckered in probably the greatest shell game of all time? Or will this heretical challenge to orthodoxy be peremptorily dismissed as revisionist nonsense, thus allowing the time-old parlour game of Pin the Tail on the Ripper to continue ad infinitum? Read the book and judge for yourself.

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Simon Daryl Wood was born in England, and in 2000 had the honour of being elected Mayor of Newtown, in Powys, Wales. He has since become a resident of California. Primarily a writer of non-fiction history, with a number of articles on the 1888 Whitechapel murders published in specialist journals, he is currently working on a book about the 1549 Prayer Book Rebellion. Simon's finely-tuned appreciation of the absurd led to the writing of Fairy Story, a fantasy adventure for children and grown-ups inspired by events on Wall Street and the ensuing culture of greed which appears to be characterizing the 21st Century. Simon can be reached at simondwoodcontact@gmail.com

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