The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders

by Peter Ackroyd

Overview

In 1880 a series of murders shakes Limehouse, a notorious London slum. The crimes attract the attention of three remarkable men: the revolutionary economist, Karl Marx; the struggling author and satirist, George Gissing; and the legendary Dan Leno, the Charlie Chaplin of his day. But it is the sensational trial of Elizabeth Cree, accused of killing her husband, that sheds light on the astonishing truth about the Limehouse murders. Deftly blending fact and fiction, Peter Ackroyd spins a suspenseful tale that probes the shadows of gaslit London.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385477079
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/1995
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.61(w) x 9.55(h) x 1.05(d)

Editorial Reviews

Peter Ackroyd is 'our most exciting and original writer... one of the few English writers of his generation who will be read in a hundred years' time.

Sunday Times (London)

A decade before Jack the Ripper terrorized the citizens of London, a serial slasher with the . . . name of 'the Limehouse Golem' murdered his way through the theater district, and this novel . . . relates the killer's spree.
—Booklist

Michael Anderson

The latest from Ackroyd (English Music) is a deft, if somewhat cerebral and cold-blooded, exercise in historical crime fiction set in a late-Victorian London teeming with intellectual activity, extreme poverty and all manner of sensational public spectacles. A blend of trial transcripts, first-person accounts and microscopic biographical studies of illustrious 19th-century lives, the story is an impressive feat of historical fidelity and fictional artistry. In a marvelous coda, Ackroyd even unites his protagonists in the audience of a theater, to watch a play based on the gruesome events of the novel. Ackroyd reminds us at every turn that his fictional whodunit enfolds a larger, unsolvable mystery, a mystery of London itself, and of the solace that its populace finds in popular spectacles of sensational crime and violence.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly