Kate Summerscale: ‘I asked myself why men choose to kill women’

Photography by Suki Dhanda for The Observer

Kate Summerscale is a bestselling true-crime author whose breakthrough book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (formerly the Samuel Johnson prize) and was adapted into an ITV drama. Her other books include The Haunting of Alma Fielding, The Wicked Boy and The Peepshow (now in paperback), about the notorious serial killer John Reginald Christie, who murdered at least eight people at his Rillington Place flat in Notting Hill during the 1940s and 50s. Born in London and brought up in Japan and Chile, Summerscale previously worked on the obituaries desk at the Daily Telegraph, where she came across the inspiration for her first novel.

What prompted you to investigate the murders at 10 Rillington Place?

In the summer of 2020, two sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, were murdered by a stranger in a park near where I live in north London. Soon afterwards, the Metropolitan police officer Wayne Couzens abducted and killed Sarah Everard. Both attacks were carefully planned. I started to ask myself why some men choose to kill women and began to look for a story that might help me understand. I dimly remembered the Christie case, a man who’d killed women and hidden them in the walls of his kitchen and under floorboards. When I started researching it, I realised he’d been a policeman, like Couzens and the officers who shared photographs of the murdered sisters. There was a chilling echo, and the book became a way of trying to trace the connections between a man who did these things and the city and society he lived in.

What did your research tell you about British society in the 1950s?

Even in 1953, rationing was still in force. There were many bombed- out buildings in London and a severe housing shortage, a lot of deprivation. There had been a huge rise in violence because of the guns still in circulation from the war, and also a big rise in prostitution – there were 10,000 women selling sex on the streets. Many were dying from backstreet abortions and Christie’s victims had fallen into his clutches because they were desperate figures who were short of money, work, safety, families and homes. He chose them for that reason.

Why did you focus primarily on the coverage of the case by Harry Procter, the star crime reporter of the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror)?

Harry had interviewed Reg Christie at 10 Rillington Place in 1949, when a double murder was discovered there [for which Christie’s neighbour Timothy Evans was wrongfully found guilty and executed], and he had failed to suspect Christie of that murder. He felt a lot of remorse and professional shame because of that, and worked obsessively to get the scoop on Christie when his serial killings were uncovered in 1953. I felt as if he could be my eyes and ears on the ground, helping me imagine myself into that place and time. It was also a way of thinking about what I was doing in writing about a violent crime. In examining the ethics of what Harry was doing, I was kind of interrogating and reflecting on my own practice.

Was it also a way of bringing to life the tabloid frenzy about the case?

It was fascinating for me, having worked in newspapers myself, to discover this very rackety, competitive, intense world of 1950s tabloid journalism. Fleet Street was extraordinarily lucrative at the time. Nearly everyone in Britain bought a daily paper, often an evening paper, too, and there was a kind of hysteria among reporters trying to get their hands on details about this case – and a lot of money to pay informants.

How do you account for the current explosion in true-crime books, documentaries and podcasts?

I think there has always been a huge appetite for true crime – not just the grisly details, but also the emotional lives of the people involved. In the 1950s, the method of conveying it was the press: radio and TV did not cover these stories in anything like the same detail. I suppose the podcasts and documentaries of today are our version of the daily newspapers that carried this material then.

You wrote recently in an essay that there’s something strangely comforting about the crime narrative.

Crime stories start with something shocking, out of place, violent, that disturbs the social order, and then the arc of the story is such that someone, usually a detective, comes along and works out what happened. They restore order, identify the culprit and in a funny way absolve the rest of society, absolve the reader and everyone else involved. But inevitably, in reality, there are questions and mysteries that remain, and I find those interesting – the crime can’t be shut away from the world that produced it and there’s often a degree of complicity.

Did you read much true crime or detective fiction growing up?

I read a lot of Agatha Christie when I was a teenager, but I’ve never read much true crime. I do read crime fiction, particularly Patricia Highsmith, alongside all the other fiction that I read.

What are you reading at the moment?

I am loving Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Long Island. I definitely read more fiction than nonfiction. I think the way I write – although I aim to be completely factual – is more influenced by the shapes of novels than traditional histories or biographies.

Where do you prefer to write?

I write in my kitchen: a nice, quiet room by the garden. I’ve never had a study dedicated to writing and work, and that’s partly because of the constraints of space. But I have also come to realise I like the feeling of writing on the hoof, and not being too self-conscious about sitting down to write. I love writing on trains because it feels like stolen time.

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place is published in paperback by Bloomsbury (£10.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop. Delivery charges may apply