A chance encounter with Silver's career in South Africa
set Charles van Onselen on a twenty five-year obsession: a journey
to reconstruct the shadowy life and times of-in some ways to match
wits with-a devious master criminal. From Russian Poland in the
1860s, where Silver was born Joseph Lis, to London in the 1880s,
turn-of-the-century New York, Argentina, and Africa, van Onselen
recaptures the dangerous demimonde of the Atlantic world. Silver's
notoriety was found among the most confidential correspondence of
a dozen countries; what those in law enforcement kept to
themselves, however, was how their officers had attempted to use
Silver as an informer to infiltrate syndicates built on vice, only
to have him outwit them as he moved in the risky space between
police and prostitutes.
Such is the
meticulousness of van Onselen's research that The Fox and the
Flies is as rich in history as it is in the detail and drama
of Silver's career, as layer after layer of his life and times are
revealed. And it has an extraordinary pay-off, for van Onselen
contends that Joseph Silver's darkest secret of all lay in London
in the autumn of 1888 when, before he embarked on his legendary
life of crime, he was, indeed, Jack the Ripper.
