Redchapel

The short story “Redchapel” (2000) by prolific and award-winning science fiction author Mike Resnick is an alternate history that brings together pre-presidency Theodore Roosevelt and the London serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. As Roosevelt investigates the murders, searching for a culprit, his fish-out-of-water experience reveals the rigid class structures of late 19th-century England. The story’s title is a play on words—Whitechapel is the name of the London slum where Jack the Ripper targeted his victims, gruesome work that painted that section of the city red.

In 1888, the already reasonably famous Teddy Roosevelt is traveling in London. By this point, his career has included stints as the New York City Police Commissioner and a Deputy Marshall, so it is only a bit surprising when a detective from the London Metropolitan Police asks him for help. Scotland Yard, the police headquarters, has decided to approach Roosevelt because they have been thrown for a loop by a recent spate of murders—the victims of a serial killer targeting prostitutes in a rundown section of the city. With condescension, the detective wonders whether Roosevelt’s experiences in “America’s untamed West” as “a politician, a rancher, a Deputy Marshall, a naturalist, an ornithologist, a taxidermist, and an author” might offer a solution to the problem of “Saucy Jack,” as the murderer has been nicknamed.

Roosevelt is part Sherlock Holmes and part Benjamin Franklin abroad, using his keen deductive skills to search for clues while playing on the assumption that Americans are fools to probe witnesses for information. He is often overbearing and larger than life, but this brashness and physical brawn—drawn from what we know of the historical Roosevelt’s actual personality—helps him navigate a city stymied by class prejudices, moral strictures, and a dedication to keeping up the status quo no matter what. Often, Roosevelt circumvents the conservative and not nearly as intuitive Scotland Yard detectives shadowing him.



At the same time, Resnick does not simply idealize Roosevelt. Instead, through quotations from real letters he had written to his wife, Edith, we see that even when he criticizes British class structures, Roosevelt is not immune from his own prejudices and biases. What comes across even more clearly is Roosevelt’s self-serving claims of loving the “common man” while in no way conceiving of himself as one. Instead, the future president is already deeply ambitious and power-hungry. Although a keen player in party politics, Roosevelt is in London partly as a stratagem by the other party to keep him from meddling in an upcoming election.

The Whitechapel Roosevelt stalks in his attempts to figure out who is murdering woman after woman is a deeply depressing, horrible place, where despair and misery reign. Because he is so different from the Londoners who have written off the people of Whitechapel altogether, Roosevelt successfully interacts with Whitechapel residents, extracting from them information they would never have shared with Scotland Yard.

Eventually, he puts together the evidence that he has gathered to determine who Jack the Ripper is. Because it is someone whom alarmed prostitutes allowed to approach, it is probably a woman and not a man. Because the killer had some basic knowledge of anatomy based on the way the dismembered bodies of the victims were laid out, it is probably someone who works in the medical field. And because there was never any time for the murderer to get on clean clothing, it must be someone who typically walks around spattered with blood without arousing suspicion. Taken together, this reasoning points to one of the midwives working in Whitechapel, whose work delivering babies and performing abortions puts her into contact with exactly the kinds of women being killed.



Roosevelt determines that the killer is a midwife named Irma, a woman who confirms that she is responsible when confronted. According to her, she killed the prostitutes because of their ungodly behavior: “They were all sinners, and God told me to rid the world of ’em!” The idea that Jack the Ripper was a woman has some real-life scholarship behind it as well.

The story ends with a postscript that puts a damper on the seemingly neat ending where Roosevelt catches the killer. When he returns to London more than 20 years later, after his term as President, “Whitechapel remained unchanged.” Nothing he does to solve the crime spree could alter the socio-economic stresses and realities of the life in that slum.