I’ve spent the last week read­ing and review­ing Bruce Robin­son’s remark­able new book on Jack the Rip­per, They All Love Jack: Bust­ing the Rip­per, which has just been longlist­ed for the 2015 Samuel John­son Prize. It’s a leviathan of a book – more than 800 pages long – and on one lev­el Robin­son has writ­ten a won­der­ful­ly scabrous exposé of the debauched lives of the Vic­to­ri­an aris­toc­ra­cy and upper class­es.

Men like Hen­ry James Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, whom Robin­son describes with typ­i­cal blunt­ness as “a clas­sic pile of shit”, and Prince Albert Vic­tor, son of the Prince of Wales, an “effete lit­tle use­less ped­erast” but not, as some Rip­per­ol­o­gists have sug­gest­ed, a can­di­date for Jack the Rip­per him­self (“non­sense”, growls Robin­son, who claims this the­o­ry is so ludi­crous it had to be an attempt to divert atten­tion from the real per­pe­tra­tor).

Both men were impli­cat­ed in a scan­dal involv­ing young boys at a male broth­el in Cleve­land Street in 1889. The ensu­ing cov­er-up result­ed in a jour­nal­ist and the low-class work­ing boys at the club being sent to jail but the upper class per­pe­tra­tors, the “top nobs”, going free: “the law had to be made a whore to save the roy­al arse”. For Robin­son this is an exam­ple of how the Vic­to­ri­an rul­ing class­es closed ranks to pro­tect their own, dur­ing both this scan­dal and that involv­ing Jack the Rip­per: “If the Crown was under threat – be it from a nan­cy prince or a Mon­ster with a Blade – it was a threat to them all”.

Both the Earl of Euston and Prince Albert Vic­tor were Freema­sons and this secre­tive organ­i­sa­tion is cen­tral to Robinson’s nar­ra­tive: “Mason­ry per­me­ates every fibre of this conun­drum”. He does not claim that the con­ceal­ment of Jack the Rip­per was a Mason­ic con­spir­a­cy and he makes it clear that he is not hos­tile to the Craft: “The Rip­per, and not I, is the ene­my of Freema­son­ry.” Instead he blames “Her Majesty’s exec­u­tive”, who were all Masons: “it was a con­spir­a­cy of the Sys­tem”.

Robin­son believes that hon­est police­men like Detec­tive Inspec­tor Fred­er­ick Abber­line, who exposed the Cleve­land Street broth­el and worked on the Rip­per case, could have eas­i­ly caught the Rip­per if they had been giv­en full access to the evi­dence. But the Sys­tem wouldn’t let Abber­line (who was not a Mason) do his job.

As well as a won­der­ful­ly angry cri­tique of the Vic­to­ri­an Estab­lish­ment, Robin­son’s book is also a foren­si­cal­ly detailed account of a cov­er-up of breath-tak­ing audac­i­ty, a crim­i­nal con­spir­a­cy to con­ceal one of the worst crimes this coun­try has ever seen. Using the let­ters sent to the police — which unlike many Rip­per­ol­o­gists he believes to be gen­uine — he cre­ates a por­trait of Jack the Rip­per as the “Mason­ic Jok­er” that is gen­uine­ly chill­ing and con­vinc­ing. After years of painstak­ing research, Robin­son has also uncov­ered a new prime sus­pect, the pop­u­lar song­writer Michael May­brick. He makes a pow­er­ful case for his guilt.

It has to be said though that after so many years, all we have is cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence and news­pa­per reports, the lat­ter usu­al­ly dis­missed by his­to­ri­ans as unre­li­able. Most of the police files have mys­te­ri­ous­ly van­ished. (Aha! exclaims Robin­son.)

But his book is a bloody good read. Read it and make your own mind up about what real­ly hap­pened in the dark streets of Whitechapel at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

My review is in today’s Guardian Review.