Although Robin Odell (1935– ) has written nearly twenty true crime volumes, his landmark book, Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction (1965), published more than a half century ago, still ranks among the most important works in the field. He continued his investigations and analysis of Red Jack in Ripperology: A Study of the World’s First Serial Killer and a Literary Phenomenon (2006), which, despite its hyperbolic subtitle (overlooking, among others, the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, reportedly responsible for the deaths of as many as six hundred fifty girls and young women in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), won the Gold Medal at the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the True Crime category and also was nominated for an Edgar. He cowrote with Colin Wilson and J. H. H. Gaute Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (1987). His most recent book on the subject is Written and Red: The Jack the Ripper Lectures (2009), covering more than thirty years of lectures. Among his other works are The Murderers’ Who’s Who: Outstanding International Cases from the Literature of Murder in the Last 150 Years, with J. H. H. Gaute (1979), which won a Special Edgar, Landmarks in 20th Century Murder (1995), and Medical Detectives: The Lives & Cases of Britain’s Forensic Five (2013).
After working as a university laboratory technician and completing his National Service, Odell developed an interest in crime writing and became one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject.
“Copy Murders and Others” was first published in Jack the Ripper in Fact and Fiction (London, George C. Harrap, 1965).