Book Review: ‘The Peepshow,’ by Kate Summerscale

Christie confessed to the crimes; the purpose of his trial was to determine whether, in the words of his often-drunk lawyer, he was “as mad as a March hare.” Spectators included Bernard Tussaud, Madame Tussaud’s great-great-grandson, who was making sketches for a wax model of Christie to put in the museum; Cecil Beaton, fresh off photographing the new Queen Elizabeth, who observed that Christie had “a tongue like an adder”; the renowned British playwright Terence Rattigan; and, oddly, the American writer Robert Sherwood, who had won an Academy Award for his screenplay of “The Best Years of Our Lives.”

But 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.

No. 10 Rillington Place was a mini melting pot, occupied by Black immigrants from the West Indies as well as working-class white Britons. It was also, it seems, a hotbed of lawlessness, rife with extramarital sex, prostitution and illegal abortion (in addition, of course, to murder).

There’s so much to admire in this engaging, deeply researched book. But though nothing Summerscale writes is dull, her story loses steam, and a bit of focus, after the conclusion of Christie’s trial, about three-quarters of the way through.

As serial killers go, Christie remains a frustrating cipher, more opportunistic than cunning — and lucky in having particularly unobservant neighbors. (No one seemed to notice that the stick propping up the gate at No. 10 was in fact a human femur.) He continually changed his story, had a habit of railing against his Black neighbors and deployed a kind of “I Shot the Sheriff” argument about the Evans murders — confessing to killing Beryl, but maintaining, at least most of the time, that he had not killed her baby.