The peepshow The murders at Rillington Place

In March of 1953, a grisly murder scene was discovered in London's then-poor Notting Hill district. The bodies of three women were found behind the kitchen wall of the ground-floor flat inhabited by Reg and Ethel Christie for years. A fourth body, soon found under the floorboards in the front room, was identified as Ethel Christie, and bodies of several other women were buried in the yard. Reg Christie was charged with the murders. Four years earlier, another tenant of the multifamily house, Tim Evans, had been convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife and child, adding a twist to Christie's already shocking case--the possibility of a miscarriage of justice, since, among several conflicting stories, Evans had accused Christie of that murder. Summerscale (The Haunting of Alma Fielding, 2021) investigates the murders, the trial, and the press coverage, highlighting tabloid crime reporter Harry Procter and author Fryn Tennyson Jesse. In-depth explorations of social tensions over race, sex, and poverty make this an absorbing portrait of post-WWII London.

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. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (May)

A true-crime exploration of notorious London murders. In the early 1950s, more than 80% of the British population subscribed to a newspaper. Nothing sold better than lurid stories, accompanied by photographs. When four women's bodies were uncovered behind a bricked-up wall in a West London boardinghouse, the tabloids struck gold. Exhaustively researched, if woodenly written, the arrest of John Reginald Halliday Christie, his trial, and his eventual execution serve as a narrative clothesline upon which hang detailed biographies of the key players, set amid a racist and misogynistic society slowly emerging from the rubble of the Blitz. Christie and his motives remain opaque; after sexually assaulting and murdering one of his victims, he "had a cup of tea and went to bed." The coverage of the trial by Harry Procter, a crime reporter for theSunday Pictorial, a newspaper that financed the defense, and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, suffering from morphine addiction and blindness, humanize the pressure brought to bear on journalists delivering the all-important "scoop." Both used the trial for personal vindication while illustrating the media's pandering to lurid spectacle. Sometimes, the abundance of detail detracts from the central focus. Do we need to know Cecil Beaton has a hangover when taking the Queen's coronation photos? The book is more effective when detailing the hardship of working-class life, particularly in the haunting biographies of the victims themselves, their families, and their upbringings. The true heartbreak lies in its depiction of poverty-stricken young women who were sex workers or much-less-well-paid cleaners and domestic servants, some sleeping in public lavatories. The cruelty and indifference meted out to them strike the reader as true crime. An exhaustive compendium of postwar misery. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.