Peter Haining – The Legend And Bizarre Crimes Of Spring Heeled Jack

Peter Haining – The Legend And Bizarre Crimes Of Spring Heeled Jack (Muller, 1977)

Blurb

“Out of the darkness sprang a huge, cloaked figure. In an instant the man had thrown aside his cloak, revealing a hideous and frightful appearance. Blue and white flames shot from his mouth, and his eyes appeared like balls of fire. The young girl who witnessed all this was so terrified that she fainted right away.”
This is just one of dozens of contemporary reports of the bizarre criminal who for over sixty years held the British population in a grip of fear. A man known only as “SPRING HEELED JACK”.

During the period of his reign of terror, this frightening, agile figure who attacked unwary travellers and pounced on terrified girls and women – and may have been responsible for several murders – attracted as many headlines and alarmed the authorities as much as his later mysterious compatriot in crime, Jack the Ripper.

From the late 1830’s he confounded the police, outwitted all attempts by the Army to catch him, and even boldly confronted law officers -slapping them across the face with his `ice cold hands’ before disappearing into the darkness with his eerie laugh ringing behind him….
Today, though, while Jack the Ripper is the subject of book after book, “SPRING HEELED JACK” has become just a name associated with anyone who jumps well. His real story is unknown. This is the first book to examine the legend in detail and throw new light on who the man behind the mask might have been.

Peter Haining’s fascinating study not only examines the reports of his activities – and suggests that more than one person adopted the disguise, including a famous nobleman -but discusses his fame as a star bf Victorian melodrama, and considers some of the strange theories that have been advanced about him -including one that he was really a spaceman!

The book is fully illustrated with remarkable engravings and photographs and includes a special section from one of the famous “Penny Dreadful” serials which featured the legend of the extraordinary “SPRING HEELED JACK”.

Peter Haining – Sweeney Todd: The Real Story Of The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street

Peter Haining – Sweeney Todd: The Real Story Of The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (Robson, 1998)

Groan. Another personal ‘one that got away’. I use to see this around fairly often, remaindered or discounted or something. Never snapped it up, because I thought it was merely a repackaging of his earlier The Mystery & Horrible Murders Of Sweeney Todd (Muller 1979). Just goes to show how wrong you can be!

Haining certainly revisits the earlier book (and his introduction to the Frederick Hazleton novel), but this time he takes it that step further as, utilizing fact, “fact”, centuries old remembered conversations and “it was rumoured at the time”s, he not only “proves” that Sweeney Todd exists, but also gives us a cradle-to-scaffold biography! How comes nobody else has consulted The Newgate Calendar for references to the meat-pie martyr and, if they did, what’s their excuse for finding zero mention of him contained in it’s grisly pages? Why have i had to wait until now to learn that Sweeney was a local lad, born in Brick Lane?

It’s research, Jim, but not as we know it. Outrageous. But in a totally brilliant way.

This time, rather fittingly, the dedication runs “To the memory of Tod Slaughter. I’m polishing ’em off well tonight!”

Peter Haining – Buried Passions: Maria Marten & The Red Barn Murder

Peter Haining – Buried Passions: Maria Marten & The Red Barn Murder (Neville Spearman, 1980)

Blurb

The story of the murder in the Red Barn is without doubt one of the most famous melodramas in the world.

The killing of the village beauty Maria Marten by the young squire William Corder in the charming, almost isolated village of Polstead in Suffolk May 1827 has become a legend over the past one hundred and fifty years, familiar to countless thousands of people.

Peter Haining has now, however, researched history and come up with some surprising new facts. Maria was just not the virtuous village beauty callously seduced and then murdered when she had served her purpose; nor was William Corder, her lover, the black-hearted local squire bent on debauchery and crime. Such simplifica­tions have come about for several reasons, yet notwithstanding the real facts, Maria and Corder are now regarded – wherever the tale is told – as the archetypal demure, cruelly-wronged maiden and mustachioed, unscrupulous Squire of melodrama. Indeed, many differing dramatisations take them as their models; and not a few of these plays are unashamedly based on what their authors imagined had happened under the decaying roof of the Red Barn. The facts, in this new assessment of the murder, make rather different, and perhaps even more fascinating, reading.

What the author has set out to do is to show how a basically unpleasant village killing became the crime of the last century. The facts present an amazing and melodramatic story of buried passions….

Profusely illustrated with line drawings and half-tones

Peter Haining – The Mystery & Horrible Murders Of Sweeney Todd

Peter Haining – The Mystery & Horrible Murders Of Sweeney Todd (Frederick Muller 1979)

Blurb

Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, is a figure famous around the world. A sinister hairdresser who is said to have disposed of his unsuspecting customers through a revolving chair, and having robbed and murdered them, handed over their corpses to his partner in crime to make into meat pies, he has few peers in the annals of crime – or British history for that matter.

Yet this extraordinary character whose name has been familiar to young and old alike since the middle of the Nineteenth Century, is shrouded in mystery:

Was he a real person who actually murdered a hundred and more victims – or just a figment of a writer’s brilliant imagination?

Why is it that although plays featuring his dark deeds have become among the most popular and enduring of any in the history of the theatre, the novel which gave him literary life has been unheard of for a century and a quarter?

And, perhaps most surprisingly of all in view of this notoriety, why has no full length study of the Demon Barber been attempted before now?

These were just some of the questions that had fascinated Peter Haining since his years as a journalist in Fleet Street, and which he finally set out to try and answer in this remarkable book. And not only has he succeeded in coming up with some surprising evidence about Sweeney Todd, but has studied the illusive book which made him famous, and made extensive use of this work. He also looks at the background to the legend, its subsequent enormous success in the entertainment media, and continued growth to the present day. Indeed he discusses all the elements that have gone towards making this such an intriguing story – and even gives space to a variety of theories about the Demon Barber -including one idea that he might actually have been a woman!

At long last, this book throws a revealing light or a figure as famous in London lore as Dick Whittington and Jack the Ripper

The throat-slasher of St. Dunstans seems to have held a lasting fascination for Haining, who also published the long forgotten Frederick Hazleton penny dreadful, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street, with a fine introduction by himself for W. H. Allen in 1980. His Sweeney Todd: The Real Story Of The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (Robson, 1998), is a reworking of the earlier books and sets out to “prove” that, not only was there some substance to the macabre story, but that Todd actually existed. It bears a dedication “To W.O.G. Lofts who helped to spring man of the traps”