Derby Book Festival – Autumn 2024

Best-selling author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher and The Haunting of Alma Fielding, Kate Summerscale returns to the Festival with her eagerly awaited take on the notorious murders at 10 Rillington Place in the 1950s.

In this riveting true story, Kate mines the archives to uncover the lives of Christie’s victims, the tabloid frenzy that their deaths inspired, and the truth about what happened inside the house.

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 beneath the floorboards, then an array of human bones in the garden. But they have already investigated a double murder at 10 Rillington Place, three years ago, and the killer was hanged. Did they get the wrong man?

A nationwide manhunt is launched for the tenant of the ground-floor flat, a softly spoken former policeman named Reg Christie. Star reporter Harry Procter chases after the scoop. Celebrated crime writer Fryn Tennyson Jesse begs to be assigned to the case. The story becomes an instant sensation, and with the relentless rise of the tabloid press the public watches on like never before. Who is Christie? Why did he choose to kill women, and to keep their bodies near him? As Harry and Fryn start to learn the full horror of what went on at Rillington Place, they realise that Christie might also have engineered a terrible miscarriage of justice in plain sight.

Kate will be in conversation with novelist Sarah Ward.