Ill-met by gaslight

What is it about Victorian murders that so grips us? The enduring fascination of Jack the Ripper caught the imagination of the American thriller writer Patricia Cornwell to such an extent that she allegedly spent more than $6 million of her own money examining the case and producing two books on the subject. (She thinks the killer was the artist Walter Sickert.) Meanwhile, Bruce Robinson, the writer and director of Withnail and I, devoted 15 years to Ripper studies: the result, They All Love Jack, is a gloriously labyrinthine, closely argued whopper of a book, rich with conspiracy theories about freemasons and the police. (He proposes another culprit, the songwriter Michael Maybrick.)

Obscurer 19th-century cases have been the subject of Kate Summerscale’s two excellent reinvestigations, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and The Wicked Boy. A film of Peter Ackroyd’s period novel, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem is newly released.