Verdict as open as ever

Readers of the thrillers of the American writer Patricia Cornwell will find elements of her new book familiar but others oddly different. Her novels are fiction closely based on fact; Portrait of a Killer purports to be a work of fact but is founded on fiction. It supposedly unravels the mystery of Jack the Ripper, a name given by the press to the most notorious serial murderer in Britain, about whom virtually nothing is known. Cornwell squarely lays these atrocious murders of East End women in 1888 at the door of the painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942). When this story first broke on US television late last year, Cornwell said that if she were to be proved wrong ‘not only will I feel horrible about it, but I will look terrible’. These may well be prophetic words.

I have no intention of defending Sickert on the grounds that he is untouchable on account of his having long been accepted as the leading artist of his period in Britain.