THE PEEPSHOW

A true-crime exploration of notorious London murders.

In the early 1950s, more than 80% of the British population subscribed to a newspaper. Nothing sold better than lurid stories, accompanied by photographs. When four women’s bodies were uncovered behind a bricked-up wall in a West London boardinghouse, the tabloids struck gold. Exhaustively researched, if woodenly written, the arrest of John Reginald Halliday Christie, his trial, and his eventual execution serve as a narrative clothesline upon which hang detailed biographies of the key players, set amid a racist and misogynistic society slowly emerging from the rubble of the Blitz. Christie and his motives remain opaque; after sexually assaulting and murdering one of his victims, he “had a cup of tea and went to bed.” The coverage of the trial by Harry Procter, a crime reporter for the Sunday Pictorial, a newspaper that financed the defense, and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, suffering from morphine addiction and blindness, humanize the pressure brought to bear on journalists delivering the all-important “scoop.” Both used the trial for personal vindication while illustrating the media’s pandering to lurid spectacle. Sometimes, the abundance of detail detracts from the central focus. Do we need to know Cecil Beaton has a hangover when taking the Queen’s coronation photos? The book is more effective when detailing the hardship of working-class life, particularly in the haunting biographies of the victims themselves, their families, and their upbringings. The true heartbreak lies in its depiction of poverty-stricken young women who were sex workers or much-less-well-paid cleaners and domestic servants, some sleeping in public lavatories. The cruelty and indifference meted out to them strike the reader as true crime.

An exhaustive compendium of postwar misery.