The Trial of Elizabeth Cree - Hardcover

Ackroyd, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385477074 ISBN 13: 9780385477079

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1995

Synopsis

A literary star returns with an addictive tale of  murder in Victorian London. 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." --  The Sunday Times (London) The  Trial Of Elizabeth Cree is without a  doubt Peter Ackroyd's breakout book. It has all the  erudition and literary brilliance we expect of  Ackroyd, yet it is as vivid, scary, and spellbinding  as the best of Edgar Allan Poe. The year is 1880,  the setting London's poor and dangerous Limehouse  district, home to immigrants and criminals. A  series of brutal murders has occurred, and, as Ackroyd  leads us down London's dark streets, the sense of  time and place becomes overwhelmingly immediate  and real. We experience the sights and sounds of the  English music halls, smell the smells of London  slums, hear the hooves of horses on the cobblestone  streets, and attend the trial of Elizabeth Cree, a  woman accused of poisoning her husband but who may  be the one person who knows the truth about the  murders. The wonderfully rhythmic shifting of focus  from trial to back alleys, where we come upon  George Gissing, author of New Grub  Street, and even Karl Marx, gives the story a  tremendous depth and resonance beyond its page-turning  thriller plot. In The Trial Of Elizabeth  Cree, Peter Ackroyd has once again  confirmed his place as one of the great writers of our  time.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography, Thames: Sacred River and London Under; biographies of figures including Charles Dickens, William Blake, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock; and a multi-volume history of England. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.

From Publishers Weekly:

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0385477074
• ISBN 13: 9780385477079
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 261