What is the first news event you can recall?
The military coup in Chile in 1973, when Augusto Pinochet overthrew the president, Salvador Allende. I was eight and my father was a British diplomat in Santiago. All the television programmes were suspended, including the soap operas I watched every day, and replaced by the national anthem played over an image of the Chilean flag. My father had to stay overnight in the embassy, which was caught up in the fighting near the presidential palace. In the months after that, a curfew was imposed throughout the country, and I would lie awake worrying when my parents weren’t home by 11pm.
If you could spend a day in one city or place at one moment in history, what would that be?
London in 1611, for the opening night of The Tempest at the Globe. I hope they’d set off fireworks to conjure up the storm at the start. I’d go to a tavern afterwards, for a venison pie and a pint of ale.
What is the biggest problem of all?
There are some new contenders, but I think it’s still climate change.
Which of your ancestors or relatives are you most proud of?
My maternal grandmother, Doris, who was partly deaf and left school after failing the 11-plus exam. She cleaned houses in Birkenhead, worked as a tea lady for Tranmere Rovers and educated herself by reading books and listening to the BBC, turned up loud. She eventually found a job as a librarian, and when my family lived abroad she used to send me wonderful parcels (Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven adventures, novels by Joan Aiken and Susan Cooper, the girls’ comics Bunty and Jinty).
What have you changed your mind about?
As a child, I assumed that the types of people who had power were cleverer and more able than the types of people who didn’t. I don’t think that now.
What is the last piece of music, play, novel or film that brought you to tears?
Justine Triet’s film Anatomy of a Fall, about a woman suspected of killing her husband. I found it completely engrossing and very moving.
What are the responsibilities of the “true crime” writer?
To remember that the crime is true, and its victims were real. In the process of constructing a story, it is easy to forget this.
Your latest book posits a new solution to the 10 Rillington Place murders. Did you expect such an outcome ahead of the writing?
No! I hoped to explore what Reg Christie’s murders might reveal about postwar Britain and about serial killers of women, and I wanted to know more about the women he had killed. I was amazed to come across a memorandum that gave a new account of a double murder at 10 Rillington Place in 1949, for which another man had hanged, and then to find an exchange of letters that showed how the memo had been suppressed.
Is it important to seek justice and the truth decades after the fact? If so, why?
It is good to keep asking how the stories we inherit were forged, and whether they are true. They shape us, so by revisiting them we have a better chance of understanding ourselves. It feels important to know what is concealed in the past—in our personal histories, our family histories, our shared social histories.
What would people be surprised to know about you?
I starred in a photo-story in Blue Jeans magazine in the 1980s. We shot it at a bowling alley in Finsbury Park and in the streets nearby, where I had to stand on a box to kiss my co-star, who was very tall.
What do you most regret?
Being fearful—of writing, for instance, which I avoided until I was nearly 30, and of having a child, which I didn’t do until I was 36. These things make me happy, so I probably shouldn’t have left them so long.
Kate Summerscale’s “The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place” (Bloomsbury Circus) is available in hardback now
