The Peepshow opens in 1953 with a sex worker being approached by a middle-aged man in spectacles in London. When she asks if he’d like to go home with her, he is insistent she come to his house. After she declines, he suggests they meet in Paddington the following day where, after completing their “business”, he will take her to his home to take some nude photos. But when the time comes, the man doesn’t show up. That weekend, she sees his photo in the News of the World and learns that he is John “Reg” Christie, now missing after police uncovered the bodies of three women, each of them strangled to death, behind the kitchen alcove in his house at 10 Rillington Place.
Kate Summerscale’s follow-up to 2020’s The Haunting of Alma Fielding unpacks the Christie murders, setting them against a backdrop of postwar London where the air was filthy, racism was rife and “spivs and flash boys … frequented the drug dens, gambling clubs, pubs and late-night cafes”.
Nicola Walker reads, her narration clear, calm and necessarily dispassionate as she recounts Christie’s grisly catalogue of crimes and the response from investigating officers, neighbours and society at large. The first bodies were discovered at the Christie house shortly after the death of Queen Mary, spouse of the late King George VI. Thousands gathered at Westminster Hall, Summerscale notes, and “a crowd of over 200 gathered at Rillington Place to watch the police at work, some settling in for the day with sandwiches and flasks of tea”.
Available via Bloomsbury Circus, 9hr 45min
Further listening
From Under the Truck
Josh Brolin, HarperCollins, 5hr 34min
The No Country for Old Men actor narrates his memoir about his unconventional childhood in Paso Robles, California, his chaotic early adulthood and rise to fame via The Goonies.
Dubliners
James Joyce, SNR Audio, 7hr 1min
A new recording of Joyce’s 1914 novel comprising 15 interconnected short stories about the inhabitants of Dublin, among them an aspiring poet and a pair of swindlers hatching a plan to con a maid. Aidan Kelly narrates.
