[In the following review, Hutchings offers a favorable assessment of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree.]

With the detailed knowledge of Victorian London that was reflected in his biography of Charles Dickens, and with the ingeniousness of plot construction associated with his previous novels, Chatterton and Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd has written The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, an intriguing and meticulously detailed account of a series of brutal murders in the Limehouse district in 1880. It is in many ways a worthy successor of the Victorians’ own “novels of sensation,” but told with a twentieth-century sophistication in its narrative technique that presents multiple points of view. The lurid crimes, known as the Golem murders (named after a malevolent spirit of Jewish legend), are remarkable not only for the ability of the murderer seemingly to vanish but also for the skill with which the victims have been mutilated.

The novel’s sensational events are recounted in part by a third-person neo-Victorian narrator, but there are also, throughout the book, chapters that reproduce documents germane to the case. Transcripts from the trial of Elizabeth Cree for the poisoning of her husband John, an eccentric would-be playwright and social critic, are included, as are excerpts from his diary, “now preserved in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum.” The fact of her conviction and execution by hanging is established in the first chapter of the novel, but neither this knowledge nor the emerging details of her troubled marriage—nor, indeed, the presence of her husband’s diaries—undercuts the book’s startling denouement. As the details of her life are established, her career as a performer in the East End music halls is described; there, comedian Dan Leno is acclaimed “The Funniest Man on Earth,” and Elizabeth Cree gains much success as a cross-dressing comedian in his company. These chapters—which are perhaps the most fascinating of the entire novel—convincingly evoke Victorian popular culture and the largely unrecorded and unrecounted world of working-class London; they also offer a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which comedy is a product of its particular era and may well not “cross over” into later times. In a structural device familiar to readers of Ackroyd’s Chatterton, however, three generations (Dan Leno, his father, and Charlie Chaplin) interestingly “intersect” across time in a single room.

Meanwhile, seemingly a world away from the raucous music halls, the elderly Karl Marx labors on with his writings in the Reading Room of the British Museum, convinced that “murder is a bourgeois preoccupation,” even though he is a friend of one of the victims. Nearby sits the young George Gissing, married to an alcoholic prostitute whose sordid life causes him to be a suspect in the murders and eventually lands him in jail. Like E. L. Doctorow, Ackroyd deftly blends the lives of his fictional characters with well-known historical figures, but in contrast to Doctorow’s recent pseudo-Sherlock Holmesian novel The Waterworks, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree is more sophisticated in its narrative technique, more plausible in its crimes, and more chillingly memorable in its final disclosures.