Kate Summerscale
Friday 18th October
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
Bestselling true crime writer and author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale, returns with her most modern case yet... one that gripped 1950s UK, stirring up a tabloid frenzy, shedding light on our modern fixation with true crime. This autumn, we're delighted to welcome Kate to our bookshop, and hope that you'll join us to hear more about The Peepshow, a stark and compelling book that shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime.
The Peepshow
London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?
A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realise that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.
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.
About Kate Summerscale
Kate Summerscale's books include The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, the Galaxy British Book of the Year Award, a Richard & Judy Book Club pick and adapted into a major ITV drama starring Peter Capaldi. She has judged prizes including the Booker Prize, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.