The Buffalo Butcher: Jack the Ripper in the Electric City
Robert Brighton
Publication date: October 8th 2023
Genres: Adult, Historical
Has Jack the Ripper returned?
Summer 1901, and the great Pan-American Exposition welcomes the world to Buffalo, New York—Queen of the Lakes . . . the Electric City. Eight million visitors throng the bustling boomtown—all of them looking for a good time.While the Pan-American blazes bright, in its shadow lies a zone of darker pleasures: the Tenderloin District, a rabbit’s warren of saloons, brothels, and ask-no-questions hotels. In this sprawling vice quarter, fully as large as the Exposition itself, fairgoers can indulge their less innocent appetites.As heat and swarming crowds choke the city, the bodies of prostitutes begin turning up, slashed and mutilated by a pitiless hand—their flesh carved with strange symbols. Their gruesome murders are a final indignity worked on once-hopeful young women.Some say the killings are the work of the Devil himself. Others hint that the Whitechapel Murderer, Jack the Ripper, has crossed the Atlantic to resume his bloody career. Yet the city’s power brokers—afraid of any publicity that would harm the Exposition—turn a blind eye to the victims.As the bloody summer wears on, only one thing is clear: it’ll be up to the working girls themselves to stop the carnage. And in The Buffalo Butcher, five of them will stand together to confront the killer . . . and to reclaim their humanity.An important new novel by Robert Brighton, acclaimed author of the Avenging Angel Detective Agency™ Mysteries.
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A NOTE TO THE READER:
From The Author…Those of you who have read some, or all, of my Avenging Angel Detective Agency Mysteries will find this book both a departure and a return.As a departure, the Avenging Angel Detective Agency doesn’t figure in this book. But as a return, we travel back to 1901, and again (as we did all too briefly in The Unsealing) make a visit to Buffalo’s historical high point—the Pan-American Exposition.Since The Buffalo Butcher is an off-s eries book—distinct from the Avenging Angel Detective Agency™ Mysteries—so you’ll find in it all new characters and the horrifying notion that in 1901, thirteen years after concluding his bloody career in London—Jack the Ripper comes to the Pan-American Exposition and begins killing prostitutes. But there’s a lot more to the story.Eight million people—about one in nine Americans—came to Buffalo, New York, to see the “Pan.” The cynics thought it was nothing more than yet another bloated world’s fair. But most found the Electric City to be an expression of all that was good and hopeful: the unity of North and South American nations, the triumph of Man over Nature, and the advent of the modern scientific and engineering marvels that would herald a new century of peace and prosperity.We can debate which camp won out, but one thing is certain. The assassination of President William McKinley in the Pan-American’s Temple of Music drew a curtain forever over the promise of the Pan— and left Buffalo with a bitter legacy that is remembered even today.
The Buffalo Butcher also takes us into a darker side of bright, up-and-coming Buffalo, then the nation’s fastest-growing city. We visit the back alleys of the Tenderloin District, a large red-light zone in the heart of downtown, where most anything was tolerated by city officials and police, so long as it stayed put. Hundreds of brothels and low-end dives huddled together in the Tenderloin and existed—for the most part—on the exploitation of young women who often had no other good option.It’s an unflinching and sometimes hard-to-bear story of the real evil that walks among us, the warped and wicked who prey on the vulnerable, and how they work their black magic. I could not turn away from that part: If you’re looking for a ‘cozy mystery’, this ain’t it—I had to tell the story in a way that would do honor to the victims, and without any sympathy for the devil.Yet, I think, Butcher it is also a story of friendship and love, decency and honor, and perhaps most of all courage, among a group of outcast women confronting loneliness, condemnation, shame, and loss.The masks come off in The Buffalo Butcher, and while as always I hope you’ll find it a good read, I hope too that you’ll find the story as touching as I did—even if a little spooky.
Award-winning author Robert Brighton is an authority on the Gilded Age, and a great believer that the Victorian era was anything but stuffy. In his Avenging Angel Detective Agency Mysteries, Brighton exposes the turbulence of the era - its passions, dreams, and disasters - against a backdrop of careful research on the places, sights, sounds, and smells of the time.
When he is not walking the streets in the footsteps of the Avenging Angels, sniffing out unsolved mysteries, Brighton is an adventurer. He has traveled in more than 50 countries around the world, personally throwing himself into every situation his characters will face - from underground ruins to opium dens - and (so far) living to tell about it.
A graduate of the Sorbonne, Paris, Brighton is an avid student of early 20th Century history and literature, an ardent and relentless investigator, and an admirer of Emily Dickinson and Jim Morrison. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their two cats.
THE BUFFALO BUTCHER:
JACK THE RIPPER IN THE ELECTRIC CITY A NOVEL
Other Titles by
ROBERT BRIGHTON
Avenging Angel Detective AgencyTM Mysteries Th e Unsealing
A Murder in Ashwood
ROBERT BRIGHTON
The Buffalo Butcher: Jack the Ripper in the Electric City A Novel by Robert Brighton
PROLOGUE
Buffalo, New York
The Tenderloin
Late June 1901
The first body was found next to a rotting shed along Vine
Alley, near the corner of Elm Street, and behind one of the worst dives in that part of the Tenderloin—Buffalo’s sprawl ing red-light district. The corpse was discovered early Sunday morning by fifteen-year-old Louise Harris, who had been emptying chamber pots into an abandoned well in back of the place.
The wells had long ago been poisoned by a rising water table of blood, shit, and urine from the area’s concentration of tanneries and slaughterhouses. By day, Vine Alley was alive with the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of cattle, sounds abruptly cut short by the stroke of a blade. By night, the low, desperate moos were replaced with the din of rattling pianos, drunken singing, and the angry scuffling of men—and sometimes women—who had come to Vine Alley for the cheapest fun that the vice district had to offer.
Emptying slops was every new girl’s early-morning chore, usually performed while the prostitutes were still sleeping off the previous night’s debauch. No one liked doing it, but it developed a strong stomach— a requirement on Vine Alley. After the pots were cleaned and replaced under each bed came collecting soiled laundry and, every once in a blue moon, scrubbing the floors.
That morning, Louise had dumped the dregs of Saturday night’s bacchanal into the old well and was about to return to her other chores when she decided to tarry a bit and sneak a cigarette behind the shed. On Sunday morning things moved slowly on Vine Alley, and she wouldn’t be risking the madam’s wrath. And, with any luck, she might find one of the working girls there, too.
Louise liked talking with the older girls and looked up to them. They had the kind of scarred, sardonic humor that sprouts when all illu sion has been plowed under, and they liked to shoot the shit, swear, and smoke. And talking was the best way for Louise to acquire the hard-won secrets of the hired girl: how to appear eager to fuck a client, no matter how foul his breath or his body; how to bring him off quickly; what douches and tonics could prevent pregnancy; and, if it came to it, where one could go to have things put right again. All this lore would make the first night of her real work—less than a year away, now—go much more smoothly.
The night before, Louise had bummed a couple of smokes while flirting with clients waiting their turn upstairs. As she rounded the corner of the shed, she removed one of the precious cigarettes from her skirt pocket and planted it between her lips. She could almost taste the smoke when she realized that she had left behind the parlor match she had pinched the night before. It wasn’t well to carry them about: par lor matches, or snapping devils as the girls called them, needed only friction to cause them to ignite. This was convenient, but in a handbag or—God forbid—a skirt pocket, loose parlor matches could, and did, cause serious injury.
Louise held out her pocket and peered into it, hoping that she was mistaken, but there was no match. She removed the cigarette from her mouth, replaced it next to the other one, and with a sigh picked up her pail again to return to the dive. When she looked up, she spied what seemed like a roll of old carpet lying next to the far corner of the shed. That didn’t make much sense, since the rag-pickers of the Tenderloin— who scoured the area for the tiniest scrap of old fabric—would never have overlooked such a treasure. She walked over and saw that the object was part of an old horse blanket, draped over some other item. She kicked it gently with the toe of her shoe. It was soft and yielding. Louise bent down and pulled back the blanket, and immediately ran back into her brothel screaming.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023946077
Th e story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this book are fi ctitious. No identifi cations with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products are intended or should be inferred.
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