Tom Slemen!

[admin tim]

http://www.slemen.com/

Heh - no fortean site would be complete without mention of this guy. 13 books on 'Haunted Liverpool' alone! We're still waiting on that Colonel Conder book, though.

Urban Legend Pan in 1960s Childwall The Highwayman Who was Captain Moonlight? The Morgawr Sir Jareen and the Runcorn Dragon Siberian Apocalypse Did an atomic spacecraft crash on earth? Death Visions Assassination of Lennon and Perceval foretold A Real Timelord? The Enigmatic Count St Germain Banshee Tale The Celtic harbinger of death Real Vampires The Fiend of Croglin Grange Dead Summoned Through A Glass Darkly The Red Gnome The weird tale of the Nain Rouge Strange Reflections Eerie tale of the Warning Mirror Dead Letter A Message from Beyond the Grave Snow Witch The Liverpool girl and Edgar Allan Poe Wolf Green The Man with the Healing Eye Great Architect The Case for God Dashing Dan The Lime Street Adventurer Silas Briginshaw The eccentric old sea dog and his seal Time Slipped The strange case of the voice from the future Mirror warning A grisly premonition in a Liverpool pub Timewalkers The Shop Down the Fourth Dimension Andrew Crosse The man who created new life Alaric Romaine Another adventure of the Rodney Street Occultist Dear Diary Time to clear the cotton merchant Red Handed The woman who bought a ghost Eye of Doom The curse of the meteoric gemstone The Ghostly Funeral Spectral cortege may spell doom The Little Cavalier When Love crosses centuries The 'Thing' Death and terror in London's Mayfair Julius Caesar Beware the Ides of March Mysterious killer This is Zodiac speaking... Little Katie The girl who changed a man's life Swift Death When the Ninja Struck in Liverpool Hell House Young men made a pact with Devil Time capsule Children asked for help from the unborn Cursed Lucre Money can't always buy you happiness Flying nun The return of the ghostly Sister of Mercy Canal Tale A boy's Journey on Time's River Gloria Hamlet Amazing Female Detective Night Terror Will you be visited by the Old Hag? Dance with Death She wooed the man who would take her life The Teacher Clock Jesamine's strange discovery Stoneley's Surprise The Bully and the Fly Colonel Blood The great mysterious theft of the Crown Jewels Akashic Records The mystical storehouse of knowledge Mary Allen Supernatural tale of returned Irish girl Pope Joan Peculiar tale of the female pontiff Good Ghosts Not all ghosts are malevolent Zozzaby The creepy ghostly clown Evil Assailant Lecherous Satanist returned from his cellar grave Little Acorns Sad tale of Harmony and Starshine Gloria's Suspicion Strange tale of a woman's intuition Dark Coincidence Sometimes murder repeats itself Buried Alive Man woke up...in a coffin Gruesome Tale Roll out the barrel captain Ice Maiden The Lady on the iceberg Arthur's Men Did you sit at the Round Table? Elevator Terror Eight-legged monster of the Ukraine


But imagine that - he seems to have removed all of his ripper tales from his website, including the one about an angry James Maybrick ghost. I'm shocked, shocked...

[Mike Covell]

I first heard of TS when my parents went on the Beatles weekend to Liverpool, my old man had called me from some back street market to ask if I wanted any of these books that this guy was selling. When I heard they were all by the same author I was a little dubious so passed!

He wrote about the "Dead Alive" RDS story and got all the facts wrong which leads me to question his other research!

[admin tim]

Latest on TS

From http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/i..._2008_at_03:14)

Slemen is currently writing a controversial book which he claims will allegedly unmask Jack the Ripper once and for all, with the working title Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent.

http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/nripper.htm

http://www.slemen.com/slemmy.html

http://genforum.genealogy.com/conder/

http://www.yoliverpool.com/forum/showthread.php?p=157484

It is Toms complete lack of intellectual curiosity into other peoples points of view if they come anywhere near to criticising him that gets up my nose. It is because of his popularist, narrow-minded and self-indulgent style that he is considered by most of the 'paranormal community' to be little more than a novelty writer. Even the Jack the Ripper community (although much politer than I am) seem to be weary of him and his soon-to-be-published-but-never-actually-seen meisterwerk.


Question: Should Conder be considered a viable suspect and placed in the Suspects Forum?

[Howard Brown]

I say "NO" Tim. We might as well put up a thread for every lunatic in Broadmoor who could walk and had two arms.

We have enough innocent men being placed in the frame. Setting up a thread for Condor in any other category is fine.

Its wonderful to discuss individuals who have been mentioned ( Carroll,Thicke,LeGrand,etc)...I think its time we put our foot down for our benefit and the way civilians percieve the field.

Let the dollar driven hi$torian make his or her bones elsewhere with crap suspect theory like Condor-as-Ripper.

I have spoken.

[Chris G.]

Hi All

I have been alerted through a contact in Liverpool that Tom Slemen's book on alleged Ripper suspect Colonel Claude Reignier Conder is apparently finally being published by Bluecoat Press this month. Bluecoat Press has published a number of other Slemen titles on Haunted Liverpool. The man who runs the company is, I am told, Colin Wilkinson, the same man who runs the "Streets of Liverpool" blog which I have been referencing elsewhere on these forums. Mr Wilkinson stated four weeks ago on a Tom Slemen thread at the Yo! Liverpool forum, that "Tom's book on the Ripper is expected late-April. It is definitely worth a read (publisher talking again)."

Chris

[Mike Covell]

I have read a couple of Slemens books, and as a man with an interest in paranormal stories vs historical fact I was not impressed, but I am looking forward to this effort.

[Chris G.]

Hi Mike

I am not sure what to expect from Tom Slemen's book on Colonel Claude Reignier Conder, although as I posted at Casebook it might be quite a different work to his paranormal books. It has been some ten years in the making so possibly it will have good information in it if it has taken that long to get it out in print. We can but hope.

Chris

[Chris G.]

Hi All

I have been alerted through a contact in Liverpool that Tom Slemen's book on alleged Ripper suspect Colonel Claude Reignier Conder is apparently finally being published by Bluecoat Press this month. Bluecoat Press has published a number of other Slemen titles on Haunted Liverpool. The man who runs the company is, I am told, Colin Wilkinson, the same man who runs the "Streets of Liverpool" blog which I have been referencing elsewhere on these forums. Mr Wilkinson stated four weeks ago on a Tom Slemen thread at the Yo! Liverpool forum, that "Tom's book on the Ripper is expected late-April. It is definitely worth a read (publisher talking again)."

Chris

Hello all

This book is now listed on Amazon's UK site as Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent by Tom Slemen and Keith Andrews for £8.99 in paperback -- although at present a notice on the site states, "Temporarily out of stock."

Chris

[Chris G.]

Hello all:

Today, from Tom Slemen's publisher, Colin Wilkinson, at Bluecoat Press, posted at Yo! Liverpool:

"It has taken a long time but at last Tom's book on Jack the Ripper is now in the shops. At 400 pages, it is a pretty heavy read but I look forward to hearing people's opinions in due course. There will always be new theories on who was the Ripper but Tom has a very original take which has drawn admiration from Richard Whittington-Egan, widely recognised as one of the foremost Ripperologists in the world."

Chris

[admin tim]

Tom Slemen on Video!

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+slemen&aq=2m

[admin tim]

"It has taken a long time but at last Tom's book on Jack the Ripper is now in the shops. At 400 pages, it is a pretty heavy read but I look forward to hearing people's opinions in due course. There will always be new theories on who was the Ripper but Tom has a very original take which has drawn admiration from Richard Whittington-Egan, widely recognised as one of the foremost Ripperologists in the world."

The trail seems to have run cold here - was there ever any followup to this?

[Chris G.]

Yes but please note that those are NOT my words but those of publisher Colin Wilkinson of The Bluecoat Press, as quoted in post number 9 above! In any case, Paul Begg's review of the book in the Rip provides the lowdown on the book.

Ripperologist No. 116, September 2010

JACK THE RIPPER: BRITISH INTELLIGENCE AGENT?
Tom Slemen with Keith Andrews
Introduction by Richard Whittington-Egan
Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 2010
Softcover, illus, index, 381pp
£8.99

Tom Slemen has chronicled Liverpool’s weird and wonderful paranormal past for a long time, penning a series of popular books and a regular column for the Liverpool Echo. They are great fun, but it has to be said that rigorous factual analysis and historical accuracy don’t appear to be among his highest priorities, and one didn’t really expect Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent? to bring us any nearer to the identity of Jack the Ripper.

And the book met one’s expectations.

Slemen’s theory that Claude Reignier Conder (1848-1910) was Jack the Ripper has been kicking around for over a decade and the book promised for almost as long, so researchers have had an opportunity to see if the idea has legs, and it hasn’t, not as far as folk could see, but with the instinctive desire to champion the underdog, one really hoped that Slemen had some eye-popping evidence, or at worst a compelling argument. Sadly Jack the Ripper: British Intelligence Agent? is the damp squib one thought it would be. It’s a moderately enjoyable read, but it isn’t serious history.

The basic theory is that all the Ripper’s victims were somehow implicated in Fenian and Anarchist activities and were murdered by Conder, a trained assassin.

Conder was born in Cheltenham and after being educated at University College London and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he carried out survey work in Palestine, where he became a friend of Kitchener and Charles Warren. He twice undertook surveys for the Palestine Exploration Fund and in later years wrote several scholarly works. According to Slemen, it was when working for the Palestine Exploration Fund that Conder acted as an intelligence agent for the British, but if that was ever the case it was purely in the capacity of collecting topographical information. There appears to be little or no reason to suppose that Conder was ever or would ever have been employed as an assassin.

This prima facie daft idea is compounded by Slemen’s claim that the Ripper’s victims were subdued by the murderer using pressure points, something a killer trained in martial arts would know how to locate. Slemen supposes that Conder had martial arts training, but as far as facts are concerned, there’s no evidence that Conder could karate chop through a paper bag.

Other ‘evidence’ implicating Conder is a claim that the murderer carved glyphs from the Moabite language on Eddowes’ face. Why he should have done that isn’t clear, and the significance of said glyphs is equally obscure, as is the claim that ‘Juwe’ is a Manchu word meaning two. Equally, of course, it was a misspelling of Jews.

Thankfully there’s an index, but notes and a list of sources would have been appreciated.

[admin tim]

Wow, I missed all that? Thanks, Chris.

My only excuse was this came out in the Rip when I was unemployed and my priorities lay elsewhere. Still, one would have thought there would have been some board discussion on this book.

No surprise, though, that both Slemen and book were but a flash in the pan.

[Pat Dunn]

Sounds as if this book received the lack of notice it deserved. I can't imagine a "trained assassin" bothering to cut open and remove internal organs from his victims if their death was his main objective.
Weak, indeed.

[Chris G.]

Sounds as if this book received the lack of notice it deserved. I can't imagine a "trained assassin" bothering to cut open and remove internal organs from his victims if their death was his main objective.
Weak, indeed.

Hi Pat

As you will be aware, a theory about Jack the Ripper doesn't have to have credibility. You just have to attach the name "Jack the Ripper" to your suspect and you can get a publisher and obtain publicity for your book. No matter how empty your ideas about the case might be, it's going to get attention. Unfortunately, that's what we've come down to.

Best regards

Chris