🔸The Peepshow 🔸

• Kate Summerscale

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‘Everything in life is but a peepshow.’

This is a true crime novel that revisits the infamous 1953 murders at Rillington Place. In 1950, Timothy Evans of Rillington Place was hung for the murder of his wife Beryl and their daughter Geraldine. But when the bodies of women are discovered in the walls of Rillington Place, lining the floorboards and buried in the garden, each killed in a similar manner to Beryl and Geraldine three years prior, the question of Timothy Evans’s innocence cannot be ignored. And a new suspect emerges; John Reginald Halliday Christie. A sallow, faintly creepy man who seems to move through life with perfect anonymity, the real terror of Reg Christie is his unprepossing everyman persona. A quote from the book: ‘To most of his neighbours and his colleagues, Christie seemed restrained, punctilious, above reproach. He had duped them […] into thinking him an upright, proper and faintly prudish member of the community.’

Summerscale reexamines the case through the eyes of some key personages – one being Harry Proctor, a journalist for the Pictorial. It prompts some very interesting questions about the morality of true crime coverage and the tabloid frenzy that surrounded the Rillington Place murders. I enjoyed Proctor’s crisis of faith in the justice system and his own place within it, which was especially informed by the flashbacks to the case of Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley, another miscarriage of justice that Proctor had covered a few years prior, as well as how the two cases led to the eventual abolition of the death penalty.

Another lens is Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a crime writer (and a distant descendant of Alfred Lord Tennyson!) I found Fryn’s perspective to be less interesting than Proctor’s, although I did like learning how the sensationalised case attracted all the prominent novelists and artists of the 50s to Christie’s trial. I did also appreciate Summerscale’s going into depth about the issue of abortion and contraception that women faced in the post-war era, and how this led to backstreet butchers like Christie profiting.

This did give a fantastic insight into early 1950s London. Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, the death of Queen Mary, waves of violence against immigrants, the great smog, the repercussions of the war – the chilling case of Reg Christie spans it all. If you’re interested in that era of history, I would highly recommend this. It doesn’t offer a definitive conclusion to the mystery of Rillington Place, which has spanned more than seventy years, but I wouldn’t really expect it to. Instead, it was a comprehensive overview of the crime and the time period that was written in a very readable and fast-paced style. I will definitely be reading more Kate Summerscale – The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is top of my list.