Book Review: ‘The Peepshow,' by Kate Summerscale

New York Times

06-05-2025

THE PEEPSHOW: The Murders at Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale
In 1953, a man putting up a shelf in an apartment in North Kensington, London, uncovered something dreadful: the bodies of three young women stashed behind a makeshift wall. A fourth corpse, that of a middle-aged resident named Ethel Christie, was beneath the floor; Ethel's husband, Reg, was suspiciously absent from the premises.
A killer was on the loose.
'Every hour he is at liberty, the life of a girl or a woman in any part of the country may suddenly come to a terrible end,' the police warned, darkly alluding to sexual assault and necrophilia. 'If the murderer is not caught, there is nothing to stop him from carrying out his bestial practices.'
Kate Summerscale's excavation of this notorious case, 'The Peepshow,' is not a whodunit, so it is no spoiler to reveal that Reg did, indeed, do it. 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.
In 1953, 80 percent of Britain's 50 million people read a daily newspaper. The most popular were the tabloids, which fed their readers' appetite for illicit sex, criminality and violence.