Pulp Fantasy Library: Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper

First published in the July 1943 issue of Weird Tales, Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” remains one of the author’s most famous short stories. In less than a dozen pages, Bloch manages to do what few others had attempted: to transplant one of history’s most notorious murderers into the modern world and suggest that his evil was not an isolated eruption of Victorian depravity but rather something timeless and ongoing.

The story’s plot is simple but clever. Set in contemporary Chicago, it follows Sir Guy Hollis, a visiting Englishman who approaches a skeptical American psychiatrist, John Carmody, with the extraordinary claim that Jack the Ripper still lives. Hollis explains that the Ripper was no mere man but an occultist who discovered a means of prolonging his life through ritual murder. The killings, he insists, have continued for decades, always masked by local crimes. Carmody humors Hollis, until a twist ending reveals the truth in classic pulp fashion, namely, that the Ripper is indeed alive and much closer than anyone suspected.

Despite its shock ending, Bloch’s tale is more than a clever “gotcha” story. It’s a condensation of the author’s lifelong preoccupations with the psychology of evil and the thin membrane separating reason from madness. Bloch's Ripper is not a shadowy figure from the past but a symbol of the persistence of violence and the darkness within modernity itself. The idea of evil as immortal, adaptable, and perversely rational is one Bloch would return to repeatedly, most famously in his novel Psycho, adapted into the even more famous Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name. Bloch's fascination with hidden monstrosity under a civilized veneer runs through “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” which expertly combines the analytic tone of mid-century crime fiction with the lurid, occult sensibility of Weird Tales.

The story also marks a bridge between two eras of pulp horror. Bloch’s early mentor, H. P. Lovecraft, had encouraged him to look beyond imitation and find his own unique take on horror. “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” shows that lesson fully absorbed. While Lovecraft looked outward to cosmic terrors, Bloch looked inward to psychological ones. His Ripper is a mortal man sustained by unholy ritual rather than an inhuman being, yet he represents a similar idea – that horror is not confined to a time or a place but an enduring truth about existence.

Other pulp writers of the same era, such as Seabury Quinn and August Derleth, had already blended supernatural elements with the detective story, but Bloch’s version somehow feels more modern than their efforts. Its clipped dialogue, urban setting, and psychiatric framing anticipate the tone of postwar noir as much as the supernatural mystery. The story’s success, both in Weird Tales and in the numerous anthologies that reprinted it, helped establish Bloch as a master of the short form and demonstrated that pulp horror could engage with contemporary anxieties rather than remain trapped in the past.

Bloch himself would later revisit the central idea of this story in a different medium. For the television series, Star Trek, he wrote the 1967 episode “Wolf in the Fold,” which imagines Jack the Ripper as an incorporeal entity feeding on fear across time and space. The science-fictional reframing underscores how adaptable the premise is and how central it was to Bloch’s conception of evil as rational and enduring. That Star Trek episode, like the 1943 story, reflects his belief that horror is never merely historical. Instead, it’s part of Man, wherever and whenever he lives.

I first encountered this story in a 1977 Del Rey anthology of Bloch's short stories whose cover is inspired by "That Hell-Bound Train," another of the stories found within it. Re-reading it for this post, I think “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” still holds up as a sharp, efficient masterpiece of pulp horror. Its structure is almost textbook in its presentation, its atmosphere thick with tension, and its theme of evil as an ongoing contagion remains hauntingly relevant. Visible within the story are both the legacy of Weird Tales and the seed of the more psychological horror that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. It’s a story that, like its title character, refuses to die.