The Peepshow
The Murders at Rillington Place
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book • A New York Times Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Book of the year by FT • Nominated for the Women's prize for nonfiction • Winner of the 2025 ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction
“A trove of thrilling material . . . skillfully examines the racism, sexism, economic privation and class prejudices that permeated postwar England . . . There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An absorbing portrait of post-WWII London.” —Booklist
From the Edgar Award–winning author of The Haunting of Alma Fielding, the tale of two journalists competing to solve the notorious Christie murders in postwar London
In March 1953, London police discovered the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy rowhouse in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they found another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. They launched a nationwide manhunt for the tenant of the ground-floor apartment, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. But they had already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place three years before, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?
The story was an instant sensation. The star reporter Harry Procter chased after the scoop on Christie. The eminent crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begged her editor to let her cover the case. To Harry and Fryn, Christie seemed a new kind of murderer: he was vacant, impersonal, a creature of a brutish postwar world. Christie liked to watch women, they discovered, and he liked to kill them. They realized that he might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice.
In this riveting true story, Kate Summerscale mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house. What she finds sheds fascinating light on the origins of our fixation with true crime—and suggests a new solution to one of the most notorious cases of the century.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Buckle up for a crime story that’s propulsive, disturbing, and completely true. This meticulously researched account takes us into a cramped home in London’s Notting Hill neighbourhood in 1953. (Seriously, it’s so crowded that five households share a bathroom.) When the bodies of multiple gruesomely murdered women are found hidden in the walls, floors, and garden of the close quarters, all signs point to resident Reg Christie, kicking off an investigation into the retired policeman that would leave Scotland Yard, the UK media, and the public at large all obsessed. Kate Summerscale digs into all the evidence as well as the fascinating background of the case, from the appalling treatment of sex workers by investigators to Christie’s experience being mustard gassed in World War I…and whether the aftereffects really could have rendered him unable to remember his crimes. Her comprehensive analysis of this disturbing case is captivating.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher) revisits one of the most controversial murder cases in British history in this engrossing true crime page-turner. In 1953, a tenant at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, London, was fixing a kitchen shelf when he tore a hole in the wallpaper and discovered a female corpse behind the wall. Police found three more bodies at the scene, including one buried beneath the floorboards of a room once rented to Reg Christie and his wife, Ethel. That body was identified as Ethel's, spurring police to arrest Christie and try him for murder. Christie's eventual conviction and admission to several other murders, despite his questionable mental state, cast doubt on the execution, three years earlier, of Timothy Evans, whose wife's and infant daughter's bodies were found on the same property. After laying out the facts of the case, Summerscale parses Christie's misogyny and experiences fighting in WWI for clues about his motives. Though she doesn't land on anything definitive, she introduces a few eyebrow-raising wrinkles to the publicly accepted narrative and paints a compassionate portrait of the victims. It's a rigorous look at a still-potent tragedy.
