KARL ALEXANDER

In 1893 (on the run from Scotland Yard)the infamous Jack the Ripper steals H.G. Wells’ time machine and journeys to 1979. Outraged, Wells follows, chases the Ripper through San Francisco determined to bring him back to justice in Victorian England. Along the way, he meets Amy Catherine “Jane” Robbins, a modern American woman, and they become time-crossed lovers. In a showdown with the Ripper, Wells uses his scientific genius to send the killer to infinity without the machine, leaving him permanently stuck out of time. Then Wells and Jane journey back to Victorian England and are married, convinced they’ll live happily ever after....

“Quite readable.”

“The use of historical personalities is neatly interlocked.”

“Diabolical tale is reader’s delight”

The year is 1979 and jack the Ripper is loose in San Francisco, his knife carving up unsuspecting young women practicing the new sexual freedom unacceptable to his warped mind,which is back in 1893.

And it’s the REAL Jack the Ripper,the one whose precise blade severed the lives of prostitutes in London in 1893 and who was never captured.

The reason, we learn in this diabolically riveting and inventive delight, is that the fiend was a friend of writer H.G. Wells, was fleeing from the police in London on a night he visited Wells and discovered the perfect way to drop from sight through Wells’ new time machine.

Alexander shows us how Jack the Ripper,really a doctor named Leslie John Stephenson,was the first time traveler, not Wells.

But when Wells learns to his voluble horror what has occurred, he sets off in pursuit, also landing in modern-day San Francisco.

There he falls in love with the first girl he sets his eyes on at the Bank of England branch near Union Square, where he naturally goes upon learning his whereabouts.

Alexander has woven a unique entertainment here, intermixing the very vivid sex crimes of Ripper with the blossoming love story of Wells and Amy Robbins, the chase between Ripper and Wells and the varying reactions of Wells and Ripper to the 20th Century with all its technological gadgetry and uniqueness,such as the fine Scottish restaurant named McDonald’s.

Alexander employs wit, good humor and a sharp needle at the contradiction of technological advances and social backwardness of our day to pull off successfully the improbable task of viewing 1979 through the bemused and befuddled eyes of a man of the 1890s.

Ripper, of course, is gleefully becoming a with-it, high-living San Fran-ciscan carving up half the town, girls of all sizes and colors, sort of an equal-opportunity murderer.

Inevitably, Ripper grabs Amy and all three set off for the sizzling climax to the tale at the time machine, now a part of an exhibit at a museum.

Aside from a bit of overwriting near the end, which offers us too much more of Wells’ endless remuneration about himself and the new era, Alexander has produced a nifty, fresh and clever combination of romance, humor, suspense and a touch of science fiction. And it’s just his first novel.”



For this novel Karl Alexander was dubbed a “Knight of Mark Twain.”