The story of John Reginald Halliday Christie and his horrible crimes has been so often rehearsed – in books, essays, documentaries, a feature film, a TV drama – that one wonders what there can possibly be left to tell. We may persuade ourselves of the need for enlightenment, an explanation of why Christie murdered at least seven women, including his wife, but deep down we know that none will be forthcoming. There is no surprising insight to glean from “the mind of a killer”, because we are ever obliged to stare into a black hole, a vanishing point, a dead end.
That Kate Summerscale has chosen to revisit the case is intriguing. I assumed at first there was fresh material to be unpacked, and Summerscale, whose prize-winning The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (2008) spearheaded the revival of interest in true crime, has a creditable record in making old stories new. As it turns out, The Peepshow marks its difference only in the author’s angle of approach. It is an inquiry not so much into the Christie case as the reporting of it by three separate individuals. This provides an oblique commentary on our appetite for domestic horror and a glimpse into the British public’s mindset during the 1940s and 50s. Neither is very edifying.
Her principal focus is Harry Procter, star crime reporter of the Sunday Pictorial, the type who had been on more doorsteps than a milk bottle. One evening in March 1953 he visited a shabby Victorian terrace in west London, 10 Rillington Place, where the bodies of three young women had been discovered. To his astonishment Procter realised that he had been to this house before, just over three years previously, when he interviewed Christie about his fellow tenant, Tim Evans, who had been charged with the murders of his wife and child. Evans was found guilty and hanged. Now Christie had disappeared, and it was dawning on Procter that he’d made an appalling mistake back then: by failing to question his interviewee more closely he might have allowed an innocent man to hang – and enabled Christie to murder again.
The story was soon blazoned across the front pages, at a time when 80% of the British population read a daily paper. One avid follower of developments was Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a writer who had made her name with a true-crime novel about the 1922 Thompson-Bywaters murder case, A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934). Aged 65, Fryn was in eclipse, addicted to morphine, her work mostly forgotten; she was also going blind. Nevertheless, once Christie was apprehended she fastened on to his trial as a chance to revive her fortunes, and secured a commission to cover it for the Notable British Trials series. Fryn’s obsession with the case perhaps derived from the traumas of her own childhood: she was initially devoted to her mother but later terrorised by her coldness and cruelty, while her father’s warped sexuality (he liked to fondle little girls) struck ominous chimes with Christie’s.
Summerscale as ever makes an excellent researcher and a somewhat dispassionate writer: her prose is doggedly unscintillating throughout. And yet in her methodical way she skewers an era, the squalid, rackety, hand-to-mouth life of 1950s London, its pawn shops and doss houses and late-night cafes. It is estimated that in 1951 about 10,000 sex workers were operating on the streets in London. One such was Kay Maloney, a desperate alcoholic who had been in prison and slept rough around Harrow Road. (Among her favourite drinks was a fortified red wine known as “jelly jump-up” and the Yorkshire ale called Stingo). She was almost certainly drunk the night she arranged to meet Christie in a pub – he had photographed her and a friend some months before – and later accompanied him home, the last time anyone saw her alive. Maloney’s was one of the corpses found propped behind a wall in Rillington Place.
Here is Summerscale’s third perspective on the story, refracted through Rosalind Wilkinson, a 24-year-old social researcher who was compiling a survey of sex workers in London during 1951-52. She befriended and interviewed more than 60 streetwalkers, in the course of which she was herself propositioned, pestered and verbally abused by punters. The dangers of the trade were well known, and Wilkinson duly recorded stories of violent assault, unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease. Yet she also came to understand these women, admired their resourcefulness and camaraderie; some chose the life because it was better paid than ordinary jobs, and not all wanted to be “rescued”. In the event her survey was published anonymously in 1955. She had fallen out with her paymasters, the British Social Biology Council, whose avowed mission was to promote the family unit and encourage a clampdown on the sex trade. Wilkinson’s report, however, served up unpalatable truths and in effect turned around the whole question of soliciting. Most of the women she interviewed were uninterested in reform and undeterred by the prospect of fines or jail time. So instead of society wringing its hands over their “immorality”, might it not be more pertinent to consider the psychology of their clients instead? As she wrote: “Who are these men?”
Christie himself remains both a troubling conundrum and a banal representative of his age. He and his wife, Ethel, were openly hostile to the black tenants in the house and filed complaints about them to the police. But Summerscale notes that Jesse, an altogether more cosmopolitan character, was also racist, an unexceptional attitude of the day that would boil over at the decade’s end into the Notting Hill race riots. To all appearances Christie was an averagely unattractive citizen, a former policeman devoted to his pets and his garden, damp of handshake, deferential to his social betters. But once beyond the wall of convention we scent a poisonous cloud of unknowing. Jesse thought him “a sexually unsatisfied little man” who needed “complete submission”; stories from his early life recount an awkwardness with women and a sexual inadequacy that people laughed at.
Here’s the thing. There are untold numbers of sexually inadequate men out in the world. They may also harbour violent feelings towards the opposite sex – but not many of them would gas a woman into unconsciousness, rape her and strangle her to death. Or wall up the body inside their own house. Or keep her pubic hair in a tin. Books like The Peepshow invite us to look closer, and yet the darkness of human behaviour refuses to yield its secret. I’m thinking of a moment during the trial when Christie, listening in the dock to an account of his atrocities, slips a note to his legal team in the well below. What could he possibly be telling them? It read: “I have run out of fags. Can you get me any?”
The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale is published by Bloomsbury (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
