Review by Booklist Review
A decade before Jack the Ripper terrorized the citizens of London, a serial slasher with the unlikely name of "the Limehouse Golem" murdered his way through the theater district, and this novel--part mystery yarn, part character study--relates the killer's spree. Esteemed British novelist Ackroyd populates his book with larger-than-life characters: Dan Leno, the music-hall comedian known as the "funniest man alive" ; Elizabeth Cree, towering, threatening, and in possession of a dark secret; and John Cree, entrepreneur, music-hall fan, and diarist; there are even cameo appearances by Kark Marx and writer George Gissing. Ackroyd tells the story in three different ways: in a third-person narrative, in the reminiscences of Elizabeth Cree, and in the horrifying diary of John Cree. Largely, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree is most notable for evoking the rollicking music-hall era (some of the song titles are priceless) of Victorian London. --Joe Collins
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. The story opens with the trial and execution of former music-hall actress Elizabeth Cree, convicted of poisoning her husband, John Cree, whose diary entries suggest that he is the ``Limehouse Golem,'' a serial killer stalking the squalid, smog-choked streets of London's Jewish district. Around these grisly deeds weave the intersecting paths of Ackroyd's nonfictional characters, including George Gissing, Karl Marx and popular theater star Dan Leno, who haunt the Reading Room of the British Museum and the chiarascuro streets of the city. The Golem's identity, in a not unexpected plot twist, is ultimately found among the protean personae of the theater world. Yet 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. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The acclaimed author of English Music (LJ 9/15/92) travels to 1880s London for the murder trial of a woman accused of poisoning her husband. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Novelist and biographer (English Music, 1992; Dickens, 1990) Ackroyd weighs in with a tale of murder from the teeming and wretched streets of 1880 London. In the book's opening pages, ex-actress Elizabeth Cree is hanged for the poisoning of her husband, John Cree: but far more hideous than Elizabeth's killing of him, as the reader (though not the police) quickly finds, have been the cold-blooded murders recently committed by John Cree himself, who once wanted to be a dramatist but now instead makes ""artistic"" tableaux of the body-parts of his victims by night, and, by day, pores over books in the Reading Room of the British Museum. As it happens, an aged Karl Marx sits on one side of Cree, a young George Gissing on the other: Marx is well acquainted with a victim-to-be (an aging Jewish scholar, whose subsequent death leads to the belief that an ""artificial being,"" a Golem, is the killer), and Gissing, through his marriage to a prostitute, is deeply entwined with the squalor, despair, and crime of London's poorest sections. Ackroyd is flawless in the lore and detail of period London, using diaries, court transcripts, and newspaper articles to unfold his tale, along with Elizabeth Cree's telling of her own life -- from illegitimate birth and grotesque childhood through her lucky discovery of London's world of musical theater, which leads to Elizabeth's stage career and allows Ackroyd to offer up still more lore of the time and bring on a cast of characters almost Dickensian (including Dan Leno, England's Charlie Chaplin of the day). If the novel's psychological drive proves thin, its social canvas is broadly, dutifully, and expertly drawn; and if its plot, especially after Elizabeth's marriage to Cree, seems cobbled, the pleasures of place and atmosphere remain. A forbiddingly enjoyable nougat, akin to The Waterworks and The Alienist, of horror and suffering and life the way they used to be. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
