Kate Summerscale talks to Andrew Wilson

The UK’s top-selling true-crime-writer Kate Summerscale discusses her latest book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, about the 1950s crimes of the serial killer and former policeman Reg Christie.

Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terraced house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, they find another body, then bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a murder at 10 Rillington Place, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man? Summerscale uncovers the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house.

Summerscale left her job as literary editor of the Daily Telegraph to write the multi award-winning The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which led to three fictional ITV dramas about Jack Whicher’s investigations. She is also author of Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace, The Wicked Boy, winner of the 2017 Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime, The Haunting of Alma Fielding and The Book of Phobias & Manias. Here she talks to novelist, biographer and journalist Andrew Wilson, author of four novels in a crime series featuring Agatha Christie.

Part of the festival’s crime fiction programme.