LOUISIANA BLOOD - UPDATE
I am now knee deep in my marketing campaign and working with Jack The Ripper forums where the whole idea was pitched many moons ago, and which produced an overwhelmingly positive response when they were asked if they wanted to see a film made re-imagining the ripper mythology. I went on to write the screenplay and it won numerous awards, got me meetings in L.A and was even part of a $600m film fund...but the budget was too big...so now, I’ve written it as a novel, unhampered by budget.
With Louisiana Blood I wanted to take a fresh look at the Ripper legend based on all the outstanding theories and come up with a modern day mystery thriller that gave it a fresh twist. Louisiana Blood is an epic conspiracy yarn following the trail of Jack The Ripper from the Victorian London of 1888, to the oil fields of modern day Louisiana, and combines nail biting suspense with explosive action.
When I started to write Louisiana Blood it was as a result of one random thought that came into my head. What if Jack The Ripper was an illusion? Very much like the film “The Man Who Never Was” When the British government arranged for a body to be washed up on the shore with fake documents to mislead the Germans about invasion plans. It leads me to think of all the things that changed as a result of the Ripper murders.
The Commissioner of police Sir Charles Warren had become unpopular with the public since Bloody Sunday, when civilians had been quelled by what some saw as heavy handed tactics. The East End was a crime and vice ridden area as developers bought up the West End and squeezed the poor into the already overcrowded East of London. Newspapers were struggling to make ends meet, and the tabloid journalism so evident today was yet to be spawned.
Prostitution was rife and the police force of the day was overwhelmed, understaffed and under funded. There was good evidence to suggest that The Duke of Clarence, though never a viable suspect in the killings, was a loose cannon as far as the reputation of the Monarchy was concerned, and was often in dubious clubs.
As to the identity of the murderer that started the whole chain of events it was hardly an unknown occurrence in such a crime ridden area for there to be violent murder on a daily basis. Certainly without the sophisticated forensic profiling and DNA tracking we have today it was not possible to form any real link between one victim and another.
It was only when the lurid details were emblazoned across the penny dreadful newspapers of the day, along with the coining of the sobriquet JACK THE RIPPER that a perceived coherence began to emerge.
The Victorian age was also one of medical advance, a time where surgeons made great strides in their knowledge of the human anatomy and it’s workings. And with this came the need to provide bodies for research, grave robbers or Resurrection Men as they were known grew to fuel demand. Experimental surgeries condoned by the medical society of the time were borderline murder.
With women plucked from bedlam, where the mentally insane were housed, being used for frontal lobotomies and sterilisation, with only crude forms of anaesthetic. In many areas of medical advancement there were practises being carried out that nowadays would be considered more in line with vivisection than pioneering surgery.
And it is within this arena of the elitist and voyeuristic abuse of women that our players step onto the stage. Dr Thomas Neil Cream, who liked nothing better than to watch the suffering of his patients as he poisoned them with various new mixtures under the guise of curing their ailments…we were to see his like again with the modern day case of Dr Shipman.
Dr Francis James Tumblety, a flamboyant man who liked to wear uniform and parade around on a horse accompanied by a pair of hounds. Once again his patients didn’t seem to come off too well under his care. He was brought in for questioning at one point when he tried to buy a specimen from a museum…no big deal, were it not for the nature of his request…a human uterus!
At the time some of the Ripper victims were being eviscerated and turning up minus that very same organ! In his defence, Tumblety claimed he was planning to publish a medical article and wanted to give away a specimen with each copy. This was certainly a unique way of marketing in it’s day and only now do we do this in a slightly less extreme form by sticking gifts on the front of magazines. There is mention of him proudly showing his collection of uteri to one of his appalled houseguests.
The police followed Dr Tumblety when he fled to New York, but they didn’t have enough evidence to extradite him. It would appear that Inspector Aberline of Scotland Yard considered him a prime suspect for the murders attributed to Jack The Ripper…my feeling is the police didn’t try hard enough to bring him back! And it was here in America that Dr Tumblety spent the last years of his life travelling between the cities of St Louis and New Orleans no doubt plying his nefarious trade, before dieing and leaving a tidy sum behind.
And so to Louisiana and Devils Swamp, a real place wherein I read of how the gas erupting from the swamp sometimes blazed for days as it burnt off the methane. Oil City so named because of the profusion of oil prospectors and wells that used to congregate here along with more colourful characters such as Diamond Jim and Bonnie and Clyde.
One of the abiding images that cropped up in my research was the postcard of Huntingdon Beach in the 1930’s and it’s endless shoreline bristling with oil derricks stretching to the horizon, a surreal blend of beach and Hades. I read how methane trapped under the earth was like a sponge able to hold vast quantities of oil until it was drilled and released deadly spumes of super heated methane gas, a fitting end for my crooked Governor.
One of the constant themes running through the story was the power of nature…the Evil Wind of 1893, the hurricane of 1915 and the effects of Katrina on the ever-shifting forces that boil beneath the swamps. The thought that sometimes an act of God can cover up an act of evil by man, only to reveal it through the same catastrophic cycle in later years. Adam Tumblety, a son born from violence goes on to hoodwink his investors into buying shares in Blackburn Oil and Gas with forged geological reports…reports that conceal dangerous substrata upon which their dreams are built.
And when the oil field becomes unstable and starts to explode in 1915, an act of God buries the evidence, only to shake it loose when Katrina stirs up the swamps again in 2005. And it is here in Louisiana, a place where so much pain has been unleashed by the hurricanes over centuries that our real story unfolds.
Thank you all for your support and I hope putting the genesis of the idea in front of you might spark you to read some of the chapters and join the pre-orders queue.
