A brooding man from Oregon comes closer, his gaze fixed on yours. He places a red-stained hand on your shoulder, and says… “It’s OK, this is only paint. Want to do some writing with me? It’s about Whitechapel and 1888.” To which the answer should be No, because I usually have little time for Jack the Ripper and the occasionally distasteful mythologising around him – or her.

But this man from Oregon is author and award-winning artist Alan M Clark, who did something very different with the Autumn of Terror in his series of intricate novels about the women who were killed, and their often tragic lives. And I had foolishly let one little thing slip concerning Mr Dry, the infamous Deptford Assassin, and those particular events. So I said Yes, instead. Alan is excellent to work with, and the project has proved very interesting.

Here’s Alan himself on the issues, the process and the state of this dark affair so far…

Shadows of Whitechapel

Is the image above a picture of Jack the Ripper’s last victim, Mary Jane Kelly? No, probably not. The woman in the photo is an attractive woman from the late Victorian period. Based on her clothing, makeup, and hair style, I’d say she might have been a prostitute. I placed the picture in this post to give a face to Mary Jane Kelly. Miss Kelly was a 19th century prostitute, a ladybird, she might have said. As far as I know, there are no pictures of her face.

I have been collaborating with author, John Linwood Grant in the past few months on two novels involving Mary Jane Kelly. They are related pieces with linked storylines, but written separately—he’s writing, The Assassin’s Coin, concerning the professional beginnings of his wonderful character, Mr. Dry, the Deptford Assassin, and I’m writing, The Prostitute’s Price, the fifth novel in my Jack the Ripper Victims Series. The links between the two stories are plot elements involving some characters, with the time period, and the environment common to both works. Some scenes occur in both novels, written from the POV of my main character in my story, his main character in his. The goal is to have two novels that, when read together, intertwined as we’re calling it, give the reader a broader understanding and a larger experience of each story. When published, the book will have chapters alternating between his novel and mine. The novels will possibly also both be published independently because each one is designed to be a complete standalone story.

My Jack the Ripper Victims Series is about the lives of the murderer’s victims, depicting what we know about each of the women in dramas that are fiction, but well-researched and meant to give readers a sense of what life might have been like for them in London of the time. There are five canonical victims of the Whitechapel Murderer. Before I started this project with John, I’d written novels about the first four: A Brutal Chill in August, about Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, about Annie Chapman, Say Anything but Your Prayers, about Elizabeth Stride, and Of Thimble and Threat, about Catherine Eddowes. The fifth book in the series is The Prostitute’s Price.

Although I’d intended to write the novel about Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim, I found myself shying away from the effort and then avoiding the work entirely for a time.

If you’ve seen the crime scene photos, perhaps you’ll understand why. At least two exist, one that is perhaps the primary taking in the whole scene, the other a close up. Much of the “trash” in the photographs exists because the images now available are from photographic products that have deteriorated with age. Those materials would be going on 130 years old. They have what looks like dust and scratches or perhaps water damage that led to mold, mildew, fungus. Whatever the cause, the deterioration has a very dirty look, making what is a disgusting scene, usually seen in a brown sepia-tone, look even worse. Taken in London’s East End in 1888, the images seem to speak accurately of what was a very filthy part of the world in the late Victorian period, indeed a place and time with some of the most impoverished people the world has known. Yet when the photos were first created, they probably had much less trash in them, and would have provided a clearer view of the victim, Mary Jane Kelly.

I considered showing the grimy photos here, but decided that those who haven’t seen them are better off. Unfortunately, these words may pique the curiosity of some who will look for the photographs.

Here is a photograph of the outside of 13 Miller’s Court, to give you an idea of what the photography of the time looked like.

The mutilation of the corpse in the photo is so extreme that it somehow wounds my sense of human worth and dignity. The outrage of the wasted humanity is bad enough, but seeing those pitiful remains on a bed in a small, squalid single-room dwelling, I also suffer an odd claustrophobia, a feeling of being trapped in that tight space at 13 Miller’s Court, where true horror took place. That gives me such a cold, dreadful feeling, I didn’t want to begin the work on the novel about Mary Jane Kelly.

Despite my revulsion, having written novels about the first four victims, I had to complete the project with the fifth.

In the midst of considering how best to start, John Linwood Grant asked me to write an introduction for, A Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales, a wonderful collection of his short fiction that he calls Tales of the Last Edwardian.

The Edwardian period begins after the end of the Victorian period. We were both writing stories that take place in similar eras, and each of us enjoyed the other’s work. Several of the stories in A Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales are about his character, Mr. Dry, the Deptford Assassin. I’d read at least three stories involving the character already, but loved them enough to read them again. In one, John gives a brief backstory for the assassin in which Mr. Dry has dealings with Jack the Ripper during the Autumn of Terror. Brief though it is, knowing quite a bit about the crimes and investigation, I found the backstory quite plausible and that gave me an idea of how to approach my novel about Mary Jane Kelly. I asked John to collaborate, and he accepted the challenge.

Here is a representation by artist Walter Sickert of Miller’s Court from very close to the time of the murder.

I won’t say more about the backstory of Mr. Dry here, because that is at the heart of the two novels we’re writing and I don’t want to give anything away.

I’ve always loved discovery in creative endeavor. Collaboration, with two or more imaginations coming together, is chocked full of it. This collaboration of intertwined novels is truly a strange one. Our assumptions about it have evolved. At the beginning, we intended to write one novel and work on that together. I presumed we’d both contribute to each chapter. Then we decided, that since we each had our own POV characters to deal with, John would write every other chapter and I’d write the rest. I’d done that with Jeremy Robert Johnson in our collaborative novel, Siren Promised. The approach worked well. Our different writing voices gave our characters distinctly different personalities. Then I proposed to John the idea of writing the separate, but related novels that could be intertwined.

Here’s why: Over the years I’d learned that frequently readers shy away from collaborations because they might know the work of one author of a collaborative novel, but not both. If they like the work of one of the authors, and don’t know the other, they sometimes think that if they buy the book, they’ll get a piece of writing by the author they do know that is watered down by the contribution of the author they don’t know.

With what were doing, one can read the novels together or separately, read one and not the other, and still have a whole experience. Of course I suggest readers enjoy both.

Writing separate novels, we are truly only consulting with one another about how to address the elements common to both works. That has taken some doing, and has been a fun process, involving much consultation via email, chat, and skyping, with an eight hour time difference between us, as John lives in Yorkshire, UK, and I’m in Eugene, Oregon in the United States.

The second image in this post is an expanded view of Miller’s Court, part photo manipulation, part drawing. If you click on it, you can see it larger and in greater detail. It is the core image in the short animated film, I did titled “13 Miller’s Court.” The broken window belongs to the room I spoke of in this post, 13 Miller’s Court, where Mary Jane Kelly was murdered. The image is derived from the black and white image with this post titled ”Miller’s Court,” and photographs of the actual Miller’s Court, also posted here, taken in the 19th century. The drawing is my reimagining of he illustration by the artist, Walter Sickert, that appeared in the Penny Illustrated Paper about a week after the murder. It is colored pencil on gray paper.

Because of my background as a horror illustrator, many who have not read the novels in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series presume they are horror novels. They are not, though they certainly have horrific elements. They are tales of survival within a harsh environment, dramas with strong female leads. They are, in fact, written for women, yet not exclusively so. Men like them too. Each one is from the singular POV of one of the victims. As a male author, it has been a great challenge to write from these feminine POVs, one that I’ve enjoyed immensely, and has helped me to love women all the more.

Thanks to John Linwood Grant for helping me enlarge the series with his own amazing contribution.

The novels The Assassin’s Coin, by John Linwood Grant, and The Prostitute’s Price, the fifth novel in my Jack the Ripper Victims Series will come out later this year in a book tentatively titled 13 Miller’s Court.

—Alan M. Clark

Eugene, Oregon

On the subject of Whitechapel and the Autumn of Terror, whilst I do steer clear of most interpretations I can at least recommend Sam Gafford’s novel Whitechapel (2017). This excellent book takes the whole matter in a somewhat different direction, with a complex interwining of classic author Arthur Machen, the London of the time and cosmic horror. Great read – available in print or Kindle formats on Amazon UK and Amazon US.

http://amzn.eu/dk9WcAE

http://a.co/dxYUYM4

There’s no doubt that I’m a product of the seventies. Mostly the nineteen seventies, though the eighteen seventies do have their influence. And I doubt there will be many more people of my year of manufacture entering the weird and strange fiction fields so late. It’s two years now since I was first published, a peculiarity due to the fact that I was persuaded to enter the Interweb world and inter-web-act with the writing world. So I did, and decided to write short stories. At the age of 57.

Being an older, later writer is odd for many reasons:

• You don’t have a (visible) pedigree of ten or twenty years of attempted or actual publication on which to fall back in discussions, self-promotion or marketing.
• You can’t rely on a ten year plan, or whatever people have. You have to do it now, and get it out there. You might keel over before that time is out, and thus…
• You have to be immediately identifiable, to come to people’s attention as someone whose work people might want to follow.
• The people you work with, and your writing peers, can be thirty or more years younger than you. Their influences and their styles are so much more current, or period-savvy, than your own.
• You don’t have a professional network of writing, editing and publishing people. You don’t really know anyone who might be useful to you.

I’d written before at length, done a lot of writing, and some editing and indexing, in technical fields. I’d also produced a few inexplicable novels, which I mostly sat on due to the day job, and the inordinate time it used to take to post things back and forth. Most curiously, I came close to have a novel published in the late eighties/early nineties, by chance, as I corresponded with a publisher about an Edwardian horror novel. They loved it, but in the end, the bosses felt the whole concept was too uncommercial. So I gave in and didn’t hawk it around. I stopped hawking anything around.

Until the Grand Re-emergence. The concepts in that novel became my series Tales of the Last Edwardian, almost thirty years later. And there are quite a few published stories in the series now, with more to come. At the moment it runs from 1886 (yes, that is Victorian) to 1940 (yes, that’s whatever you want to call it). The Last Edwardian is centred around a number of linked characters, some of them born in the mid to late Victorian period, whose actions and legacies continue through to the present day.

(The key to the series is Henry Dodgson, an illegitimate son of Lewis Carroll who ends up being one of the circle attracted to Carnacki, author William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective. Dodgson is often the least important character, if he appears at all, but everyone else links to him in some way. And he is the only one still alive in 2018. I’ll explain that one day, if I’m fortunate to last long enough.)

Older writers might be advised to write what they know, or in fields with which they are familiar. And to tap into what few links they have. But I have a grasshopper mind, and get bored easily. So the first story I submitted, in late 2015 I think, was a sort of young adult myth reworking about ogres to a US market I’d never heard of. They took it straight away, and published it in April/May 2016.

The second thing I wrote was a military spy-spiritualist-mystery novella set in 1908, which even dragged in an ageing and sceptical Sherlock Holmes. The third thing I wrote was the story of a mother and daughter serving Nyarlathotep in his millennia-long plan against the source of all cosmic horror. Those sold on submission as well – but you couldn’t exactly say I was following a pattern.

I have no advice for older writers. It’s exhausting, you don’t make enough money, marketing is a nightmare, and almost everything I’ve had published has been through contacts made in North America, not the UK. You can expect publishers to fold on you before you blink, and when you’re 60, waiting a year to see if something sells is a hell of a long wait. Also surprisingly pertinent, a single set of health problems can cut you out for a month or two at just the wrong time, and the world moves on whether you’re there or not. In some cases, especially where older people are running the small independent presses with whom you might work, you can be left wondering whether you or the publisher will go into hospital first.

(I might also mumble about the aches, the stress on ancient neck, back, fingers and wrists, and the tiredness when trying to deal with the huge time differences between continents and publishers. But loads of people have to deal with those, anyway.)

It’s been worth it, yes, but sustaining the piston strokes is hard work. This year I should have the following published (leaving out things I can’t yet announce), with once again no discernible connection between most of them:

On Abydos, Dreaming. The story of a scarred and bitter golem operative searching for death or redemption on a planet where an incomprehensible alien artefact dictates telempathic storms. Short story in the Survivors anthology from Lethe Press.

Death Among the Marigolds. During the Second World War, actress Margaret Rutherford gets confused with her stage role as Madame Arcati by a young woman who believes she is haunted. Novelette in the Silver Sleuths anthology from 18thWall Productions.

Sanctuary. A girl of the Finnfolk seeks shelter in a village where the old ways of the Cunning Folk still hold, and a community is under threat. Short story in Weirdbook magazine/anthology.

In the Hour of the Pale Dog. An old woman employed as a leatherworker in a dusty, unimportant village must draw on her own past to face the plains reavers who come to cleanse the area. Short story in Skelos magazine.

Songs of the Burning Men. A sombre tale of the horror of the trenches in World War One, and the baleful influence of a record left behind by dead French troops. Short story in the Chromatic Court anthology from 18thWall Productions.

Those Who Stay. The manager of a strange and isolated hotel on the cliffs recounts the tale of three visitors and their fate at the Langton. Short story in the Voices in the Darkness anthology from Ulthar Press.

The Assassin’s Coin. Being the details of how Mr Edwin Dry became known as the Deptford Assassin, and how he decided that the Whitechapel Murderer was a nuisance who needed removing. Novel from IFD Publishing.

So there you are. You’re never to old to do something stupid, basically.

When it comes to editing magazines and anthologies, some people seem to enjoy it. I don’t, not especially. I like giving life to new ideas and finding platforms for other people’s fiction or art. I hate slush reading, decision making, administration and writing rejections. My key editorial ethos is probably ‘Try not to screw up too often’. And I hadn’t planned on writing this piece, but recent social media discussions have corkscrewed their way into my brain.

The role of the editor(s) and diversity in anthology or magazine contents is one of Those Things. It’s an important Thing, but can easily drive you to despondency or endless argumentifying. A lot of the discussions this week have been about the question of female writers’ presence in Tables of Contents and, putting it bluntly, the degree to which ToCs often seem to be dominated by male writers, especially white male writers. However, I think this raises the broader subject of editors’ approaches to diversity in general, which is more the meat here today.

(Incidentally, as an editor I tend to feel that you’re basically getting something wrong with every issue or volume, and you know it, even when no one else notices. When people do notice, you are doomed by being resolute in the face of criticism, and doomed by trying to explain that your good intentions were trampled by the Elephants of Life.)

WHAT FOLLOWS BELOW CONTAINS NO DEFINITE ANSWERS, BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW ANY. AND I BARELY KNOW WHAT I’M DOING SOME DAYS. SO THERE.

NOTE TO COVER MY BACK, ALMOST: I can be a bit random about terminology. Feel free to exchange ‘Chinese’ or ‘desi writer’ for ‘black writer’; ‘non-binary’ or ‘gender-fluid’ for ‘queer’ and so on. I’m writing in diversity shorthand rather than wanting to make lists. Many recent discussions have taken ‘straight white male’ as the default position for majority inclusion in many projects, and there’s certainly a history to that, so I’ll use it here. Write your own piece if it offends you.

Diversity for the Common Editor

1. WHO DO YOU SERVE?

This is an underlying matter I’d like to get out of the way. Unless you’re running some sort of weird one-person vanity show, it seems to me that as an editor you serve too many masters and mistresses from the word Go.

• Your publisher – needs to avoid bankruptcy or a reputation for putting out endless volumes of barely readable tosh.
• Your writers – need to sell their work to you and have it seen by as wide an audience as possible, in a decently edited format.
• Your readers – want something which is both worth their cash and in line with their reading interests.
• You – want to produce something of which you can be proud, and/or which makes you a pittance or enhances your reputation.

That’s a lot to deal with from the start. Let’s be honest. I’ve acquired stories that weren’t my cup of fish (as a recreational reader). And I’ve rejected ones that I loved. We’re not talking about the quality of the stories here, only the question of how much your personal taste guides your selections. Misguidedly or not, I’ve done this to try and serve readers, to showcase a range of tales which might appeal to the broadest audience. I’m not the one who’s going to buy this stuff, after all.

For each of the above, there are other issues you have to bear in mind. What does your publisher feel about diversity? Are there matters which go beyond any one magazine or anthology going on here, related to their wider activities? And if you think you know your audience to any degree, what’s the vibe there – is it hungry for change and new approaches, or is it staid and suspicious? As you select, you have to be hoping and guessing about that audience – does it really like what you think it likes? Or are you deliberately selecting for people who you think aren’t well served by other anthologies and magazines, which is another and perfectly valid choice again?

(Also worth checking – did you invent your audience in your head and wake up later to flashbacks of Vietnam and the Airborne cavalry?)

2. ARE YOU LEGION?

There’s an argument for single-handed editors of established skill and taste, and one for collectives of editors. Real life often means that small/independent press editorial boards are simply a few colleagues who already get on, and may do so because they have shared tastes and interests. As most are working for little or nothing, it’s for the love – or it started that way. What might a varied editorial board, if you had that luxury, have to offer? They might well:

• Provide confidence, their presence encouraging writers from a wider range of backgrounds to submit in the first place.
• Bring a more extensive contact list at every level from submissions to marketing.
• Act as promoters of particular styles and areas of interest.
• Sound loud warnings on the acquisition of too many similar pieces.
• Spot dodgy representations of particular groups.
• Take more risks (not guaranteed – achieving consensus can mean playing it safe as well).

Editorial groups do have their limits, so be gentle. Nancy Tinubu from the local writers’ collective is not a gestalt avatar of all young black women, nor an endless source of answers as to the entire field of Afrikan literary, political and cultural issues. She might be bloody useful, though.

Some readers do like the stability of a single editor, one whose previous anthologies or issues they enjoyed. Almost a brand feel (Ellen Datlow, to pick the most immediate example that comes to mind, is often cited in that category). That, however, is contingent on the mind-set of the single editor, and we all have blind spots about our own choices. I mean, that selection of fourteen very similar Cthulhu pastiches written by a group of close friends, all of whom are middle-aged lapsed Baptist real estate agents and all of whom happen to live in the same town, for example. How could people say that it was ‘somewhat lacking in variety’? The ingrates.

3. DID YOU TELL PEOPLE?

Which is also ‘Did you tell people and did they believe you?’ Anyone can call out for submissions from a diverse range of writers from different backgrounds, cultures, skin colours, sexual identifications and so on. You can even do it and not mean it. It’s certainly vital to make your position clear early on. But what happens next?

• They never found out – if you can’t find your way into the social networks, loose confederations, contact lists and niche hangouts of many different types of writer, they may never realise that you would like them to come forward.
• Your hands are empty – you want them, but you don’t have a concrete example to prove it. Your last book or magazine had no non-white authors in, for example. It was how the submissions fell that time, and it happens.
• They prefer focus – at this stage they see more mileage in specialist outlets or ones specifically set up to highlight the work of societal sections/groups with which they identify, not a general writing market.
• They don’t trust you – they’ve heard all this before, and are dubious. You might be merely talking the talk to sound right on, man. Or whatever cool people say these days.

You can’t make people write for you. You can review any editorial statements, guidelines and open call marketing you put out, and think hard about how they sound to others. You can make an extra effort to share any guidelines about your approach. I mean, there was that ‘All Women’ special of Carcass Noire, where you forgot to encourage female writers to submit or circulate the Open Call in the right places, and had to get some of the guys to change their names to Daphne and Enid in order to fill the issue. Do you have to remember everything? Yes.

4. BLIND SOLICITORS

How hard and crystalline a route to diversity do you want to take in your editorial capacity? There are two very different steps you can try:

a) Direct solicitation – simply contact every decent non-white, or non-male, or non-straight writer you know and say you want a story from them. If you don’t know any, that’s a bit rough, and shows you haven’t been paying attention to the field at all. You suck.

Many will be too busy, or not interested in the theme, etc, so this can be a slow business. It’s not very good for finding the talent that you don’t know about, unfortunately, and can end up as its own nepotistic little bug if that’s all you do. Once started, it has to be developed.

OR

b) Blind reading – if you think you’ve done what you can so far to reach out to a cross-section of the writers you would like to submit, read submissions blind, i.e. with all identifying information stripped at the slush stage. It’s not perfect, because you can’t strip your head of your own fancies or prejudices. And again, you can’t make people write for you, but you can hope that some will consider this a good way to get seen without any editor having prior baggage about them or their work.

Blind reading can be a way round the fact that the writing world has its incestuous moments, and you are going to know, even be friends with, some of the submitters. You may even spot their style, but it might help. Mind-set comes up again, of course, because if you’re determined only to have a particular character set or number of tropes, you may well sabotage yourself anyway. That’s where a group or board can be useful.

5. DID YOU TAKE THEIR WORK?

Male writers, female writers, queer writers, black writers – everyone gets rejection slips. Authors in wheelchairs and authors from Sri Lanka can write rubbish, just like anyone else. Equality of incompetence has an effect – if you get three barely so-so stories from the broader range of writers you wanted, and thirty great stories from white male career writers, what do you do? If you’re blind reading, you may well end up with those guys.

But if you weight your selection, who wants to say they took a story because they didn’t have any other hearing-impaired or Inuit writers who submitted, even though the story was a bit lame? And who wants to be the writer who was accepted on that basis?

Alternatively, you could:

• Dedicate a number of slots to authors of particular identities or origins – it can be done, but it can vary from being a passionate statement to being another token gesture (I’m talking general magazines and anthologies here, not theme and author specific issues, which have a different place and purpose).
• Encourage and accept stories with diverse characters and cultural backgrounds, no matter who wrote them, to try and fire up the engine, to let people know you want change. Not ideal, but it shows you can imagine moving out there.
• Redouble your editorial marketing efforts – probably the best choice. Encourage confidence. Work at it so that you get so many submissions from the wider pool that you’re pretty much guaranteed to have some winners.

6. WHY BOTHER?

Every so often silly people ask why on earth diversity is important in this context. It’s the easiest question to answer, of all of them. You can be as self-serving or noble as you want if you intend to be a successful editor. Take your pick:

• Talent is everywhere. Extraordinary talent is hidden in little known corners. If you close your books except to a set section of our societies, you miss genius and wonder. Entirely selfishly, you might miss out on being the one who can say ‘Hey, I’m cool. Look at what I found!’
• Social justice and equity apply not only in biscuit factories, but in the literary world as well. Close your doors, put your hands over your eyes and ears, in any context, and you’re the problem.
• Everyone has money, but there’s too much to read. If you want to grab those pounds, dollars or rupees first, you want to interest as many individuals and groups as possible before your core readership slips into senility.
• Yes, you might get applauded for being reliable but slightly dull. Is that all you want?
• Overt or covert exclusion is the tool of controlling agents who are unlikely to have your interests at heart. Why should they? Rise up and mutter ominously. Even editors can change the occasional opinion.

7. IN NO CONCLUSION

I’m open to complaints and comments about any of the above. This should have been written by a far more erudite, far more experienced editor than me. If I get sound new information, I adjust. If I’ve made a genuine mistake, I adjust. It’s what you do (or should do). I’m aware that having good intentions doesn’t always cut it, though I believe it can help. I may well even revise my own editorial habits as a result of writing this. I probably will.

And I am also a writer, after all. Getting a fair chance to be considered is always an issue for any writer. I come from the old Write, Sluice the Yard, and Write Again School, but I’m hardly unaware that I have privileges. You might well ask what could go wrong for a reasonably experienced white male author, except that we would drift into discussions on whether or not you’re ‘in vogue’, ‘cutting edge’ or have the wrong circle of writing and publishing friends – or just no friends. And if you forgot to grab the attention of that crucial editor in the one second when they noticed you. No one really wants to be the snotty little kid who didn’t get invited to Danny’s seventh birthday party, and ended up setting fire to Danny’s Spiderman costume that night. With Danny in it (well, OK, maybe not many of you).

But the important point is the privilege aspect. I’m not marginalised. I don’t have to look at endless Tables of Contents and say ‘Why are there so few white guys like me in there?’ I’m not embarrassed or apologetic about being what I am. I simply think everyone should have a fair crack of the herring.

Oh, and if you want to submit to Occult Detective Quarterly when we open again, I want the most fantastical set of submissions from the most wildly diverse set of writers. I want stories of every culture from writers of every culture and self-identification. And you know I mean it, because I’m ancient and get bored very easily. I’m selfish – I need diversity to keep me interested in this stony little globe…

Proper posts, lurchers, author features and interviews are on their way…