“The Making of” Strange Case of Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel
Exclusive photo slideshow (click Play) and author essay (below)
Exclusive photo slideshow (click Play) and author essay (below)
I NEVER EXPECTED to write a book like Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel and had no particular interest in mash-ups, re-tellings, sequels or adaptations. But a few years ago, while on a writing retreat in the Catskills, I wandered into a small public library and in the for-sale section was a copy of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I had read and enjoyed it before, but this edition had an introduction by Nabokov that seemed worth perusing, and at the least I liked supporting a library, if only to the tune of a cool twenty-five cents. Little did I know!
I did, in fact, re-read the novel, and then a short while after, while at a day job, I leaned down to get something from a desk drawer, and my mind turned to the Jekyll and Hyde story and I pondered over the other side of the story. What if the story had been written about a man with good and evil in his nature taking the potion and releasing his purely good side?
It would be fun to write that the room vibrated with a blue glow of inspiration – but really, I got whatever it was I needed from the desk drawer, and my day at work continued on. I liked the idea and began playing with it, however, meditating on various ways of telling the story, but always coming back to an actual re-writing of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Stevenson’s novel is such an efficient little instrument of mystery, suspense, and psychological exploration that it didn’t seem necessary to re-invent a new one, and in line with the ‘dual nature’ theme, mirroring the original book to show the other side of the potion’s power greatly appealed to me.
My original draft was as close to a note-for-note re-telling as was possible: it even clocked in at just about 26,000 words, the length of Jekyll & Hyde. And while it told the same essential story as the current Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel – C.S. Loch the famed philanthropist hunting Father Whitechapel, the saintly counterpart of cold-hearted banker Geoffrey Bodkin – by hewing so close to the original, it came off as a clever literary exercise rather than a self-sufficient story. I realized this, but I was unsure of what to do and where to go with the project. But I remembered something the great Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, wrote: “Sometimes the best way to generate new ideas is to go out and learn something.” Simple advice, but often overlooked, as artists and writers often get stuck rummaging around in their own minds for an “answer” and end up just sifting through what they already know, over and over.
So I threw myself back into Victorian London and began reading, reading, reading: everything from books such as Fishman’s exhaustive East End 1888, the Ripper Casebook online archive, much primary source material of the Charity Organisation Society (such as the mission statement from the Royal Guide to London Charities, as reproduced in the book), and lots of 19th-century news articles that I could access from digital archives. And ordering a facsimile of C.S. Loch’s original diaries from the Senate House Library of the University of London was the ultimate vindication that my effort was paying off – or resounding proof that I was naïve to have ever thought this project could work without this type of deep and detailed research.
That point is one that I’d like to emphasize, if only for myself. Writers are some of the laziest people on earth – or, no, not really lazy in a traditional sense of the word. We’ll work hard when we have to, but by God, how we kick and fight to avoid it! I always did well in school, but I also wanted to do the minimum work required to get a good grade. Of course the end result was that between the energy I spent doing the necessary work added to the energy spent scheming how to do the least of it possible, I broke even at best, maybe even less than that since my work ethic wasn’t as developed as it should have been. But this novel project showed me that taking the easier road leads to a clever literary experiment: nicely turned, but hardly a rich and publishable story. (I cannot resist pointing out that so, too, was Stevenson afflicted with the writer’s laziness: he first drafted Jekyll & Hyde as a ‘penny dreadful,’ a cheap and simple horror story, before scrapping the manuscript and re-writing it as an intricate tale of suspense and metaphysical exploration.)
So: back to my historical research. The more I did, the more excited I became, since some of the “ripped-from-the-headlines” events I uncovered and integrated into my story were far more authentic and compelling than I could have invented on my own. And since I don’t think Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel would have worked well as a sprawling historical tome, my hope is that the interspersed ephemera and news snippets give the book a palpable Victorian atmosphere without bogging it down in pages of details and descriptions, which is not the purpose of extensive research.
But best of all was being able to read Loch’s personal diaries. True, most of the text was tedious and irrelevant, and the blurry typewriter script (see above in the photos) was not especially easy on the eyes. But every so often, wading through the entries, something jumped out that was so wonderfully germane to my story that I actually fidgeted with excitement. I never intended to make my book a biography of Loch, and it is not, but by learning as much as I could about him, I learned more about my story and how to make it both a companion volume to Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and a self-standing novel. (To wit, the diary clued me in on Loch’s religious views and his ‘spiritual scepticism,’ teaching me how he would view Father Whitechapel.)
Composing in Victorian-era prose and doing my best to mimic Stevenson’s voice was also a fruitful and humbling exercise. Writers in the early stages of their career often focus too much on consciously trying to find (or: create) their “voice.” But I believe that comes in its own time and cannot be rushed or forced, whereas neglecting the fundamentals of any art or craft in one’s early development may limit one’s potential for creative expression. Certainly, writing Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel as a genuine companion volume —“knit closer than an eye”— felt at times like more craft than art, but I believe it is exactly that which made the work so valuable for a relatively inexperienced writer.
Regardless of what (or any) commercial or critical success Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel finds, writing the story was superb training ground for an aspiring novelist. When in the deepest thick of the work, I had the entirety of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde near-memorized, and it is not often that anyone has the motivation and professional necessity to become so acquainted with a classic work of literature. But I never tired of Stevenson’s story, and in fact with each successive read I better appreciated not only his granite prose but his ingenious construction of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. His ability to build suspense through multiple perspectives, while keeping a sense of utter believability, is one that I still marvel over. In fact, when someone asks me for a book recommendation, my first reply is invariably: “Have you read the original Jekyll & Hyde?” (Along the same lines, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a much more profound novel than the “Frankenstein monster story” everyone knows.) And so to that end, attempting to write a worthy companion to the original Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was an apprenticeship of the best kind, and I am pleased to present Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel.
I did, in fact, re-read the novel, and then a short while after, while at a day job, I leaned down to get something from a desk drawer, and my mind turned to the Jekyll and Hyde story and I pondered over the other side of the story. What if the story had been written about a man with good and evil in his nature taking the potion and releasing his purely good side?
It would be fun to write that the room vibrated with a blue glow of inspiration – but really, I got whatever it was I needed from the desk drawer, and my day at work continued on. I liked the idea and began playing with it, however, meditating on various ways of telling the story, but always coming back to an actual re-writing of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Stevenson’s novel is such an efficient little instrument of mystery, suspense, and psychological exploration that it didn’t seem necessary to re-invent a new one, and in line with the ‘dual nature’ theme, mirroring the original book to show the other side of the potion’s power greatly appealed to me.
My original draft was as close to a note-for-note re-telling as was possible: it even clocked in at just about 26,000 words, the length of Jekyll & Hyde. And while it told the same essential story as the current Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel – C.S. Loch the famed philanthropist hunting Father Whitechapel, the saintly counterpart of cold-hearted banker Geoffrey Bodkin – by hewing so close to the original, it came off as a clever literary exercise rather than a self-sufficient story. I realized this, but I was unsure of what to do and where to go with the project. But I remembered something the great Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin & Hobbes, wrote: “Sometimes the best way to generate new ideas is to go out and learn something.” Simple advice, but often overlooked, as artists and writers often get stuck rummaging around in their own minds for an “answer” and end up just sifting through what they already know, over and over.
So I threw myself back into Victorian London and began reading, reading, reading: everything from books such as Fishman’s exhaustive East End 1888, the Ripper Casebook online archive, much primary source material of the Charity Organisation Society (such as the mission statement from the Royal Guide to London Charities, as reproduced in the book), and lots of 19th-century news articles that I could access from digital archives. And ordering a facsimile of C.S. Loch’s original diaries from the Senate House Library of the University of London was the ultimate vindication that my effort was paying off – or resounding proof that I was naïve to have ever thought this project could work without this type of deep and detailed research.
That point is one that I’d like to emphasize, if only for myself. Writers are some of the laziest people on earth – or, no, not really lazy in a traditional sense of the word. We’ll work hard when we have to, but by God, how we kick and fight to avoid it! I always did well in school, but I also wanted to do the minimum work required to get a good grade. Of course the end result was that between the energy I spent doing the necessary work added to the energy spent scheming how to do the least of it possible, I broke even at best, maybe even less than that since my work ethic wasn’t as developed as it should have been. But this novel project showed me that taking the easier road leads to a clever literary experiment: nicely turned, but hardly a rich and publishable story. (I cannot resist pointing out that so, too, was Stevenson afflicted with the writer’s laziness: he first drafted Jekyll & Hyde as a ‘penny dreadful,’ a cheap and simple horror story, before scrapping the manuscript and re-writing it as an intricate tale of suspense and metaphysical exploration.)
So: back to my historical research. The more I did, the more excited I became, since some of the “ripped-from-the-headlines” events I uncovered and integrated into my story were far more authentic and compelling than I could have invented on my own. And since I don’t think Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel would have worked well as a sprawling historical tome, my hope is that the interspersed ephemera and news snippets give the book a palpable Victorian atmosphere without bogging it down in pages of details and descriptions, which is not the purpose of extensive research.
But best of all was being able to read Loch’s personal diaries. True, most of the text was tedious and irrelevant, and the blurry typewriter script (see above in the photos) was not especially easy on the eyes. But every so often, wading through the entries, something jumped out that was so wonderfully germane to my story that I actually fidgeted with excitement. I never intended to make my book a biography of Loch, and it is not, but by learning as much as I could about him, I learned more about my story and how to make it both a companion volume to Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and a self-standing novel. (To wit, the diary clued me in on Loch’s religious views and his ‘spiritual scepticism,’ teaching me how he would view Father Whitechapel.)
Composing in Victorian-era prose and doing my best to mimic Stevenson’s voice was also a fruitful and humbling exercise. Writers in the early stages of their career often focus too much on consciously trying to find (or: create) their “voice.” But I believe that comes in its own time and cannot be rushed or forced, whereas neglecting the fundamentals of any art or craft in one’s early development may limit one’s potential for creative expression. Certainly, writing Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel as a genuine companion volume —“knit closer than an eye”— felt at times like more craft than art, but I believe it is exactly that which made the work so valuable for a relatively inexperienced writer.
Regardless of what (or any) commercial or critical success Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel finds, writing the story was superb training ground for an aspiring novelist. When in the deepest thick of the work, I had the entirety of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde near-memorized, and it is not often that anyone has the motivation and professional necessity to become so acquainted with a classic work of literature. But I never tired of Stevenson’s story, and in fact with each successive read I better appreciated not only his granite prose but his ingenious construction of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. His ability to build suspense through multiple perspectives, while keeping a sense of utter believability, is one that I still marvel over. In fact, when someone asks me for a book recommendation, my first reply is invariably: “Have you read the original Jekyll & Hyde?” (Along the same lines, Shelley’s Frankenstein is a much more profound novel than the “Frankenstein monster story” everyone knows.) And so to that end, attempting to write a worthy companion to the original Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde was an apprenticeship of the best kind, and I am pleased to present Mr. Bodkin & Father Whitechapel.
