Now Kate Summerscale, whose previous true crime book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher was turned into a television series, has won the Gold Dagger for non-fiction at the Crime Writers Association’s Daggers awards for her latest work The Peepshow.
The book delves into the ten-year murder spree of Notting Hill accounts clerk John Christie and the discovery of eight sets of female remains at his home 10, Rillington Place, but also examines how the murders – and victims – were viewed at the time.
John Christie, who murdered women and hid them behind the walls of his house at 10, Rillington Place in Notting Hill in the 1940s and 50s. (Image: PA) The case was preceded by a notorious miscarriage of justice when upstairs tenant Timothy Evans was hanged for the murders of his wife and baby daughter three years before Christie’s arrest.
Summerscale’s book explores how the eventual revelation of Christie’s culpability led to calls to end the death penalty.
Reflecting on the award, the West Hampstead writer said: “It was absolutely brilliant to win.”
“It’s good that the Crime Writers Association has a prize for true crime stories because it was considered a disreputable genre, but it has rich stuff about the psychology of violence, social history, and the workings of the justice system.”
One, Harold Procter, was an ambitious tabloid journalist who had doorstepped Christie during the Evans trial without suspecting he was the culprit.
“He was tenacious, unscrupulous, charming and determined to get the scoop on Christie,” says Summerscale.
“He had a personal stake in it because he interviewed Christie at the time of this double murder three years earlier and never thought to suspect him.
The second figure is true crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse, who attended the trial and invited detectives, lawyers and pathologists in the case to her home in Melina Place, St John’s Wood, where she pumped them for information.
She wrote an influential 1957 essay linking Christie to the Evans case.
“She was an acclaimed novelist and true crime essayist who was addicted to morphine and lived in a Regency villa worlds away from Notting Hill,” says Summerscale.
“She became obsessed with the case and was desperate to get to the Old Bailey to see Christie’s trial, and invited everyone to come to her house to tell her what had gone on.”
She adds: “They are both crime writers, my predecessors, and I tried to imagine myself into that moment of the investigation.”
Summerscale spent three years researching and writing the book, trawling archives and public enquiries.
She says London in the early 1950s was “intriguing to write about.”
“Christie’s crimes were uncovered in 1953; he had been killing women for a decade at that point. I realised during my research how much London was still in the shadow of the Second World War with rationing and bomb-damaged buildings.
“It was a turbulent time of social deprivation and immigration. Women had gone into the workplace and discovered some liberation and that created a febrile atmosphere, but there was a huge rise in prostitution during the war and thousands of sex workers still on the streets of London.”
She also fleshes out the sex workers and young working class women Christie lured to his house before gassing, raping and strangling them.
“I noticed how dismissively the victims were described at the time – they were vulnerable through poverty, separated from their families and their disappearances were rarely investigated in the chaos of the war,” she says.
“It was fascinating to research their individual histories, personalities and hopes for the future.
“In the archives there was a wealth of witness statements, photographs and letters with details of who these women were, their boyfriends and friends – poor working class women whose lives would otherwise have gone unrecorded.”
As for Christie, he suffered from impotence and she speculates was threatened by the sexual freedom of the women he saw on London’s streets.
“He was a middle-aged, apparently respectable, white collar worker secretly killing women and walling them up in his home.
“He had served in the First World War and as a police officer in the Second World War, and was married for 30 years. That enabled him to escape scrutiny for years.
“The police who investigated knew him as a former officer and I’m sure that blinded them to the possibility that he had any hand in these squalid murders.”
Summerscale says the lockdown murders of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman by a stranger who set out to kill multiple women was the “trigger” for Sumerscale’s book.
She added: “Those murders and the Sarah Everard case, another woman picked out randomly because she was a woman, made me think about why some men kill women just because they are women.
“This was a way of trying to understand the present through looking at the past, to look at a place and time and how it gives rise to certain forms of violence.
“How that enriches our understanding of that time – what it was like for women who didn’t have any money and became pregnant out of wedlock – and how some things have changed and some remained the same.”
Examining these 1950s crime writers, Summerscale also considers “how we write about crime, the risks of the genre”.
She said: “I’m aiming to write about more than just an act of violence but the roots of it, the context and the emotions it precipitated.
“Jesse tried to distance herself from the crimes, describing Christie as a monster and the victims as murderees and I could see how some of those attitudes that played out in the newspapers and courts enabled him to commit these crimes.”
But Procter may have got too close.
“Harold’s moral crusade for justice broke him in the end,” she adds. “He published his scoops but he begged his bosses not to put him on more crime stories. They didn’t listen and he had a nervous breakdown.”
Intrigued that women outnumber men two to one in their consumption of true crime podcasts and documentaries, Summerscale says: “There is a general curiosity about the psychology of murder and the worst things humans can do, but for women it’s ‘who are those people?’ ‘How can we recognise them? How do they operate?’
“It’s almost self-preservative acquisition of knowledge. They identify with the victims imagining their lives and plight, but the rehearsal of one’s worst fears can be strangely soothing.”
The Peepshow The Murders at Rillington Place is published by Bloomsbury and the paperback edition is out on August 7.
