The Peepshow

I gave up on The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by about page 30; bogged down in all the historical detail. The Peepshow I couldn’t stop reading. But don’t ask me why because I’m not sure myself.

It’s an account of the murders at the infamous 10, Rillington Place. It’s also a story of the victims. It’s about London in the 1940s and 50s: the bad housing conditions; the open racism; prostitution; the risks of illegal abortion. And it’s a look at the lives of two people who wrote about those murders: tabloid journalist Harry Procter, always on the lookout for the sensational, and the more ‘respectable’ author Fryn Tennyson Jesse, writing an essay for the ‘Notable British Trials’ series.

It's all of this, skipping from one subject to another in a way that’s never confusing, but at the same time left me wondering what Kate Summerscale was after in the writing. In the end, I decided to settle on seeing it as a portrait of a specific time, focussed around a series of killings nobody’s ever been 100% able to say were all committed by one man. Was it just Reginald Christie, or did his upstairs fellow tenant Timothy Evans play a part too?

The book’s back cover blurb offers ‘a new solution to one of the twentieth century’s most notorious crimes’, but don’t buy the book if that’s what you’re looking for because it’s less a solution than a suggestion. Convincing, certainly, but not definite. 

And it doesn't mar the achievement of the book at all.