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.
From Library Journal
Mixing history with liberal doses of invention, Ackroyd (English Music, LJ 9/15/92) presents a dark, atmospheric portrait of Victorian London. While bringing in everyone from an elderly Karl Marx to a youthful George Gissing, he focuses on Elizabeth Cree, who is on trial for her husband's murder. Ackroyd uses the transcripts of Cree's trial to set the stage for a series of flashbacks tracing her squalid beginnings in Lambeth Marsh, her days in comedian Dan Leno's music hall troupe, and her eventual marriage to journalist John Cree. Set against this is a diary, purportedly by John, that details the murderous exploits of the "Limehouse Golem." In Elizabeth's pathology, Ackroyd finds a harbinger for the social malignancies of our own age. An intellectually stimulating, if grisly, historical thriller. Recommended for most collections.
-?Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
