2014 read #17: The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd.

The Trial of Elizabeth Cree: A Novel of the Limehouse Murders by Peter Ackroyd
261 pages
Published 1994
Read from February 16 to February 17
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Peter Ackroyd's writing, marvelous though it can be, is often rutted in one particular métier. The man is a brilliant factotum of London history and trivia, particularly the more grisly and sensational turns, and his novels and nofiction work alike return to the same well of remarkable coincidences and geographical peculiarities of the Great Wen, and the odd connections that can be drawn between personages and events. The Trial of Elizabeth Cree centers on one of the more memorable of these coincidences, the two mass murders committed seventy years apart in the same dwelling on Ratcliffe Highway.

Elizabeth Cree is an interesting protagonist, especially after the ending (one of the rare twist endings that both caught me by surprise and worked for me on a dramatic level). Ackroyd's need to drag in those historical connections between events and people, however, led to less fully realized chapters from the perspectives of Dan Leno, George Gissing, and Karl Marx. Marx especially seems dragged in for no real dramatic reason, merely as a prop for Ackroyd to demonstrate another one of his beloved historical conjunctions. Nonetheless, I had no real complaints about these inclusions, accepting them as the inevitable texture of an Ackroyd novel.