I’m Jack by Mark Blacklock review – a spotlight on the Yorkshire Ripper hoaxer

By early 1978 West Yorkshire police’s ongoing investigation into the serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper had reached breaking point. Then, in March, a letter arrived at headquarters addressed to George Oldfield, the assistant chief constable heading the inquiry. Over the course of the next year and three months two more letters were sent, signed “Jack the Ripper”, and, most significantly, a tape, all purporting to be from the killer. The police changed course and focused on Sunderland, from where the communications originated.

In late June of 1979, the recording of “Wearside Jack” taunting the beleaguered Oldfield was broadcast over and over again, becoming seared into public imagination and memory. It played over the airwaves of our local radio station in Sheffield almost as nightly entertainment. From my bedroom window I would stare, transfixed, into the blackness of the garden, wondering if “he” were somewhere out there in the shadows.

South Yorkshire had not been targeted by the Ripper at that point, but on 2 January 1981 Peter Sutcliffe was caught in the lane behind my school, initially arrested for having fake number plates on his car. The young woman he had picked up from the red-light district around the corner a few minutes earlier had the luckiest escape of her life. Yet because of the concentration on Wearside Jack, the inquiry had taken a false and disastrous turn, leaving Sutcliffe, the actual killer, who had by then been interviewed nine times by police, free to murder three more women.

Oldfield was retired from the case due to ill health in late 1979 and died in 1985. One of his many tactical errors was the assertion that the killer craved publicity; his complicity in the crude hoax left his reputation in tatters. Even as Sutcliffe’s trial began, Oldfield still believed the letters and tape were linked to the murders. It was not until 2005 and random DNA testing that John Samuel Humble, a petty criminal in his late 40s from Castletown, Sunderland, was identified as Wearside Jack, charged with perverting the course of justice, and jailed for eight years.

With his first book, Mark Blacklock fits effortlessly into the lineup of accomplished literary chroniclers of the Ripper years, such as David Peace and the late Gordon Burn. In common with Burn, whose outstanding Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son provided forensic biographical details and compelling psychological insights into Sutcliffe’s crimes, Blacklock has fashioned an intelligent, disturbing slice of noir, which falls into no particular category – rather like his subject. He reconstructs Humble’s preferred epistolary style to develop further the “relationship” between Wearside Jack and the now deceased police officer. Blacklock’s Humble continues to address Oldfield in a mock-affectionate, softly menacing tone, complete with all the syntactical idiosyncracies of Humble’s original missives, which set graphologists off in a tailspin.

The narrative is interspersed with police and psychological reports, creative writing exercises, letters to Humble in prison from cranks and obsessives, and an extended piece of pulp fiction. Born in Sunderland in 1974, just prior to the start of Sutcliffe’s spree, Blacklock has the area’s linguistic cadences and landmarks at his fingertips, as well as its cavernous history and quiet desperation. The varied range and wit of his polyphonic chorus are reminiscent of Joe Orton’s darkly subversive correspondence pranks. Humble, as portrayed by Blacklock, is the bored fantasist with few prospects who craves notoriety because no one listens to him down the pub. By turns apologetic, self-pitying and defiant, the man who calls himself “Jackanory” and “Jack the Giant Killer” takes on a new alias when he is freed on licence: the book ends with his application to change his name.

Should we be interested in Humble as a piece of cultural history, the 20th-century foil to his true fascination, Jack the Ripper? The women who Sutcliffe butchered so frenziedly, “the lasses” to whom Humble expresses his own careless misogyny, remain as mere ciphers. Apart from Pat Barker’s exceptional 1984 novel Blow Your House Down and Joan Smith’s ever-relevant essay “There’s Only One Yorkshire Ripper”, there has been little writing by women published on this topic. Instead, the Ripper story – to which Wearside Jack is a pathetic but powerful adjunct – has become a relentless examination of male identity, of violence most horribly, and somehow perpetually, in bloom.