Book 34: "The Limehouse Golem" by Peter Ackroyd

[kittiwake]

I have read this book a couple of times before and already knew who is murdered by whom, so this time I paid more attention to the historical characters who appear in this book. Karl Marx nearly gets himself murdered and George Gissing's real-life marital woes fit in well with the themes of this novel, while Oscar Wilde has a non-speaking part as a vain young author who makes sure he is noticed working in the British Library Writing Room. And of course there is music hall legend and pantomime dame extraordinaire Dan Leno, whose date of birth has been changed from 1860 to 1850, making him a teenager when his manager employs the young Limehouse Marsh Lizzie as a prompter in the mid-1860s, fifteen years before the Limehouse Golem murders.