Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem

Peter Ackroyd

When the opening chapter of a book describes the routine hanging of a London woman in the 1880s and ends a couple of pages later with the prison governor, in an act of astonishing perversion, taking the smock in which the woman hanged and dressing up in it at night, you know you're in for something strange and compelling. And what could be better than the following diary entry a couple of chapters later? "September 6, 1880: It was a fine bright morning, and I could feel a murder coming on".

The prison governor's nocturnal habits are never explained nor do we meet him again. But we do follow the story of the hanged woman, Elizabeth Cree, and, switching between trial transcripts, diaries and a mix of narrators, we learn of her upbringing among the London poor, her debut on stage alongside the great Dan Leno in music hall and her arrest for poisoning her husband. Also murdering his way through 1880s London is a mysterious serial killer popularly known as the Limehouse Golem (from Jewish folklore). The golem's victims are each strangely connected to Elizabeth Cree; a prostitute she was friends with ripped open and left bleeding to death by the Thames; a family whose store she shopped at butchered in their own home; an old Jew who'd shared a cab with her husband clubbed to death and his penis laid out amongst the things on his desk.

As if effortlessly constructing a compelling Victorian horror story over the top of a complex narrative structure isn't enough for Peter Ackroyd he also mixes historical characters with fictional ones, serves up a vivid description of music hall in the 1880s, offers a potted history of the career of real-life comic performer and drag act Dan Leno (at the time "The Funniest Man on Earth") and (for Ackroyd is a great historian of the city) paints a portrait of 1880s London as convincing as it is revolting (at one point a foetus is tossed into the Thames but the river is so foul-smelling and fetid there is no danger it will be discovered). There are walk on parts for Karl Marx (briefly suspected of the murders) and George Gissing and we visit Charles Babbage's analytical engine, the forerunner of the modern computer. Somehow the vast 19th Century computer is made by Ackroyd to seem as brooding and malevolent a presence in the city as any serial-killer.

It's a wonderful, wonderful book and I don't know why it isn't more famous. From browsing round Amazon it seems it has been published in other countries with a variety of inferior titles and covers. No matter, track it down, it won't disappoint.