Ed Gorman & Martin Greenberg. Solved (1991) What do you get when you ask crime fiction writers to write stories that “solve” unsolved crimes of the past? You get a pile of pulp fiction. The stories here offer all the familiar formulas: conspiracies, mob-corrupted politicians, psycho-pathologies, megalomaniacs, and so on. Plus more or less vivid gore. Entertaining reads, but not especially memorable, in fact, I’m having a hard time recalling the stories.
The Jack the Ripper tale works best, I think: a vicar’s wife tells how she comes to suspect her pompously pious and uncharitable husband is the Ripper, and how she expects to burn in Hell for having poisoned him with arsenic. Told obliquely in the first person, it works because the character is plausibly devout. **
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