The Peepshow - by Kate Summerscale (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

*Named a Best Book of 2024 by FT*

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.

Review Quotes

"A gripping true crime tale that is an unflinching portrait of a postwar Britain riven with sexism and racism." --FT, Best Books of 2024

"Summerscale captures all the horrible fascination of Christie's crimes, but also expertly situates them in their troubled post-war setting. The result is a gripping account of murder, misogyny and spectatorship that has implications well beyond the tragic orbit of the case itself. A haunting, thought-provoking, deeply unsettling book." --Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

"Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime." --Val McDermid, author of Past Lying

"There are few authors whose work I look forward to as much as Kate Summerscale's, and The Peepshow does not disappoint. It is a forensic reappraisal of a grimy episode in postwar British history; at once shocking, impeccably researched, lucidly written and always utterly compelling." --Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of His Bloody Project

"Kate Summerscale's multi-layered page-turner The Peepshow, which inverts the classic true crime structure, is masterful. The mystery is not who committed a series of murders in 1950s London but whether there had been a gross miscarriage of justice, as told through one tabloid reporter's attempt to redeem himself by revealing it. It's also an unflinching examination of the true crime industry--a look at the boundary between making visible the unseen and the exploitation of tragedy--and no one, not even the reader, escapes complicity." --Becky Cooper, author of We Keep the Dead Close

"The Peepshow is a masterclass in true crime storytelling. Stark and compulsive it tells a story both of murder and those who write about it in a way that is as relevant now as it was in the 1950's." --Jennie Godfrey, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The List of Suspicious Things

"I blame The Peepshow for too many late nights, when I simply couldn't put it down. Horrifying, intriguing and entertaining in equal measure." --Becky Holmes, author of Keanu Reeves Is Not in Love with You

"Quite apart from its superb pacing and prose, its deep social history, there is a brilliant strain of feminism." --Laura Cumming, author of Thunderclap (via X/Twitter)

"The Peepshow is a savory story sure to keep readers up all night. Summerscale delivers a jewel in the true crime genre, one so thoroughly researched and deliciously British that for anyone to miss it would be to miss out on something masterful." --Jax Miller, author of Hell in the Heartland

"A crystalline, compelling account of a notorious crime you think you know well . . . Seamlessly blends the pleasures of a good novel with the enlightenment of masterly reportage. A gem."--Dominic Nolan, author of Vine Street

"Summerscale rebuilds the dark past with such captivating intelligence that she makes eyewitnesses of us all." --Laurence Scott, author of Picnic Comma Lightening

"This intelligent and implacable account of a notorious post-war horror proves that no established memory of the past is definitive. The Peepshow is ruthless for truth, for previously unregarded details that expose the true horrors of a conflicted landscape, internal and external. This re-visioning of a dark London nightmare has the rigour and complexity of the best novels." --Iain Sinclair, author of Pariah Genius

"Gripping as a thriller and supremely atmospheric, The Peepshow gazes inside the murder house of 10 Rillington Place and reveals, beyond that, the bombed-out post-war Britain that this sad, sordid, significant case both fascinated and reflected. Superb story-telling from the queen of true crime." --Laura Thompson, author of Take Six Girls

About the Author

Kate Summerscale, formerly the literary editor of The Telegraph, is the author of The Book of Phobias and Manias, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a number one bestseller in the UK, which was translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the British Book Awards Book of the Year. Her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay, won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award, The Wicked Boy won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and The Haunting of Alma Fielding was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Summerscale lives in London.