The Fox and the Flies
The Criminal World of the Whitechapel Murderer
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
At the end of the nineteenth century European pimps and 'white slavers' established a hugely successful global market for commercial sex and for three turbulent decades before the First World War, Joseph Silver was central to this hidden world of betrayal, intrigue, lust and sexual slavery.
Burglar, gun-runner and trafficker in women on four continents, Silver was a disturbed adolescent, youthful predator and adult misogynist whose notoriety was captured in the most confidential correspondence of a dozen countries in the western world. But what those in charge of law-enforcement agencies kept to themselves was how their officers had attempted to use Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates, only to have him outwit them as he moved in the dangerous space between police and prostitutes.
In this brilliant study, Charles van Onselen situates the private life of one man amidst the demi-monde of the Atlantic world and casts a brilliant light on the most infamous serial killer of all time - Jack the Ripper.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning South African historian Van Onselen has crafted a riveting narrative portraying the life and crimes of Joseph Silver (1868 "1918), a violent man whose story is almost too improbable to be true. Silver terrorized women on four continents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rising from humble Jewish roots in a small Polish town to become a leading trafficker in female slaves. With masterful survival instincts, Silver locked horns with the forces of law and order in England, the U.S., South Africa and Argentina, often corrupting those who pursued him and even, in a jaw-dropping display of chutzpah, serving on occasion as a police officer himself. Despite the overall fascination with Silver, Van Onselen's excellent book will receive more notice for its final chapter, in which he makes a compelling circumstantial case for Silver being Jack the Ripper. While the evidence is somewhat more speculative than the author concedes, he deserves credit for identifying a man with a history of violence against prostitutes who apparently lived in the heart of Whitechapel during the 1888 Autumn of Terror, and who matched some eyewitness descriptions of suspicious figures seen with the victims shortly before their deaths. B&w photos, maps.
