Authors Electric

"' Begin at the beginning. ' the king said gravely, ' and go on until you come to the end. Then stop .'" I'm thinking a lot about beginnings right now. This is not so much because it's January, though that's natural. I've never been much for New Year's rituals and resolutions. The universe gives not a rat's patootie that we don party hats and make noise at an arbitrary point in our orbit around second-rate Sol on the seedy outskirts of the Milky Way. Jorge Luis Borges pointed out that "time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day - perhaps every hour - is different." Indeed, this January seems very different from the last. It feels more like an end - maybe the end - than a beginning. We've had our cup of kindness for auld lang syne, yet can't forget the blood orange orb rising over Amerca. It's not a new day, but a brutish one ...

  Saucy Jack! Black Jack! Leather Apron! Oh no, no. One name alone does justice to your deathless razzmatazz. And nothing can do justice to the leap from your brief reign to world-wide Rippermania. It all started on four fog-swept nights... The Facts Scene: The impoverished areas in and around Whitechapel, London. Year: 1888. Five prostitutes--Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly--were murdered between 31 August and 9 November 1888. These women are the "canonical five", believed to have been murdered by a single killer. Three had had internal organs removed with surgical precision. And the fifth kill was the grisliest.  Why Black Magic Beats Mere Numbers Oh, Jack. You might have been only a footnote in the annals of serial killers. The competition today is tremendous: Luis Garavito.  Colombian child-murderer, torture-killer, and rapist known as ”La Bestia”. Confessed to killing 140 children over...

My dad, Edward Carroll Wouldn't it be nice to get so famous that the Who Do You Think You Are? TV team did a programme on your ancestors? They make it look so easy with allocated genealogists and historians doing all the leg work then coming up with the results effortlessly. Ah, if only! Although doing the research is half the fun. There's something fascinating about tracing your family tree, discovering your roots, seeing what skeletons are lurking in the cupboards. And of course, the great thing is, with self publishing there's nothing stopping anyone from producing the finished story as a book or website without any major financial outlay should they want to.  My research has taken me back to the mid 1800s so far and I was lucky in that my mum wrote her life story in notebooks, which I'm busy transcribing. I just wish I'd asked her more questions when she and my dad were still around. My mum, Violet Carroll (nee Hardy) I'm also sc...