The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale

 

... "everything in life is but a peep-show"

9781526660480

Bloomsbury Circus, 2024

300 pp

hardcover

Before I get started here, let me just say that the entire month of February was just horrible.  My very sweet spouse had three  surgeries during that time, one of which was unexpected and directly on the back of the second after his blood pressure dropped so low during recovery that I actually thought that this was it.  The good news is that it wasn't his time, apparently, and little by little as he's been regaining his physical strength, I've been working on getting back to some semblance of mental normalcy, not always an easy feat.   But here I am again after this sort of forced hiatus, ready to get on. 

Most of my reading was done via audiobooks for passing long, quiet hours, but I did manage to get my hands on a physical copy of Kate Summerscale's newest book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place.  I bought mine at Blackwell's (postage to US included in price!) because the US release isn't until May 6th and I didn't want to wait.  I've read several of this author's books, including The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (which I loved), The Wicked Boy (which I didn't love) and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, and I think with The Peepshow she brings much less of the extraneous detail she usually brings to her books for the reader to wade through, and more of an opportunity to draw connections between that time and our own.  It is both a true crime sort of read and a social history and really, I believe it is her best work yet. 

You can look up 10 Rillington Place online if you've not heard of the crimes that occurred there, but in a nutshell, it was the address in the Notting Hill section of North London that was the home of John Christie, who lived there with his wife Ethel in the ground-floor flat.  In 1948, Timothy Evans and his wife Beryl arrived at this place and lived upstairs from the Christies, and in 1949, Beryl and their baby Geraldine were killed, with Timothy being charged with and tried for the baby's death.  John Christie served as a witness against Evans at his 1950 trial, and Evans was found guilty of and hanged for the crime.   Later, after Ethel had supposedly gone off without him, Christie eventually left the flat, another tenant who had permission from the landlord to use the Christie kitchen started cleaning and found a space to hang a shelf for his radio.  He discovered that the wall where he wanted to put his shelf was hollow, and there he discovered a hidden cupboard. When he used a light to look inside, he made the horrific discovery of what seemed to be the body of a naked woman. Eventually the police would find the bodies of several other women both inside and outside the Christie flat, along with evidence that would point to Christie as their killer.  Christie by this time was on the run, and would eventually be found, charged and tried for his crimes.  

In putting her book together, Summerscale tells of events through the eyes of  two reporters: Harry Procter, a successful and highly-driven tabloid journalist,  and author Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who approached events from a much different perspective, and whose analysis of the case would eventually appear in the volume of the Notable British Trials series featuring the trials of both Timothy Evans and John Christie in 1957.  

contemporary headlines, from Murderpedia

Procter, as she quotes another journalist here,  

"did not just report a story; 'he infiltrated it, embedded himself, then owned it, then manipulated its protagonists as puppeteer-in-chief so that everything fell into place, as, and when, and exactly how, he wished.' " 

In the book that had inspired him to become a reporter, The Street of Adventure, author Philip Gibbs wrote  that "everything in life is but a peep-show," and that reporters felt like "the only real people in the world."  When he got wind of the story at 10 Rillington Place after the first bodies had been discovered and Christie had gone on the run, Procter went to the scene only to realize, "with a shock," that he had been there before when he worked for The Daily Mail.  It was during the time when Tim Evans had been charged with murder, and Procter had interviewed Christie about his neighbor.  Christie had been polite and soft spoken, and at the time, Procter saw no reason at all to suspect that Christie might have had anything to do with the deaths.  Now though, he not only "cursed himself for not having questioned him more closely" at the time, since it was obvious that Christie must be behind the current murders, but as Summerscale writes, Procter considered it possible that Christie just might have framed Evans for something Christie himself had done, and may have helped to send an innocent man to the gallows.  His personal stakes were high in getting Christie's story, both in terms of somehow making Christie feel the need to confess to the murders of Beryl and her baby and of course, reporting the story that would completely make his career.   Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who had been "gripped" by the coverage of the murders, was, as the author notes, "part of a golden generation of female crime writers. One of her books, Murder and Its Motives focused on (as noted here) "Six spectacular murders of the past century," and she had also written a novel called A Pin to See the Peepshow, which author Sarah Waters described in a Guardian article as "an achingly human portrait;" a  "thinly fictionalised account of the life of ... Edith Thompson, one of the three main players in the 'Ilford murder' case of 1922. "  She had also written essays in the Notable British Trials series.  Summerscale states that Jesse, now sixty-five, was going blind, was "frail" and a morphine addict, and was "afraid that she was being forgotten," so she "hungered for a story that would restore her."  If she could do the write up of the Christie case for Notable British Trials, it would be just what she needed.    Neither Procter nor Jesse could fathom Christie's lack of moral responsibility for his deeds, another factor bringing the two strands of reporting together.  

 What stands out about Christie here is that he was a man who outwardly resembled any number of men his age of the time, looking respectably average in his suit and his spectacles, while speaking softly and serving in a number of respectable positions.  When he was being sought by the police, it seemed that people saw him everywhere because he seemed so ordinary.  Summerscale gets behind that veil of respectability to reveal  a virulent racist who couldn't stand the fact that West Indian people were living in his building, even blaming the horrific odors of decomposition on his upstairs neighbors, an idea that was readily accepted by people who came into his apartment.  He was also a complete misogynist who viewed himself as passive while the women he victimized were the aggressors, and even to the last he  refused to show any sort of remorse for what he'd done.   If this book were only about John Christie and his crimes it would still be very good, but the author goes deeper into the lives of the many victims (doing so with the great care that these women truly deserve) as well as the social, political and economic landscapes of the time, while also diving into the power/machinations of the press  and the readers who lapped up every word. The dustjacket blurb says that her mining of the archives "sheds fascinating light on the origins our fixation with true crime," and although there is no definitive answer behind the biggest question of them all (i.e. who really killed Beryl and Geraldine Evans),  the blurb  also notes that Summerscale does "suggest" a possibility. 

I can only begin to imagine how much research went into writing this book and it shows.  I absolutely did not want to put this book down while reading and when I had to do so, I couldn't get back to it fast enough.  I found it to be an enlightening piece of social history,  a book that I can highly recommend.