The Peepshow - by Kate Summerscale (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Riveting... Simultaneously revels in and criticizes the press's shameless bravado in shaping the Christie murder investigation ... The author questions our own ambivalent complicity in the 'peepshow' of true-crime reportage ... Ms. Summerscale's evocation of Christie's purse-lipped, self-satisfaction and his bossy, neurotic pride relates British repression to obsession, prudishness to prurience." --Sara Lodge, Wall Street Journal

"Summerscale, the multiple-award-winning author of five previous books, brings a novelist's eye and a sociologist's understanding to a trove of thrilling material . . . peppered with eccentric figures and interesting asides . . . Summerscale gives equal time to Christie's unfortunate victims, treating them as real people rather than pawns in someone else's story. And she 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." --Sarah Lyall, New York Times Book Review

"Very good . . . persuasive social analysis, both historical and contemporary . . . Absorbing, authoritative and well researched." --Chris Hewitt, Minnesota Star Tribune

"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 revisits one of the most controversial murder cases in British history in this engrossing true crime page-turner . . . 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." --Publishers Weekly

"Exhaustively researched . . . 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 . . . 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 strikes the reader as true crime." --Kirkus

"Gripping, entertaining."--BookPage

"An absorbing portrait of post-WWII London." --Booklist

"A remarkable read, riveting without ever being salacious, this offers a fresh perspective on one of Britain's most notorious cases. Rillington Place has often been covered but Summerscale recreates the grime, greyness and repression of an utterly different era with a novelist's eye and an appreciation of the difficult, rootless lives of the victims." --Judges, ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction

"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

"[One of] the best true crime writers working today . . . Summerscale has uncovered a wealth of information." --Meaghan Walsh Gerard

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.