Kate Summerscale was born in 1965 in London. She is a writer and journalist whose bestselling narrative non-fiction book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher won the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize.
What’s your earliest memory?
Looking down at my feet on a pavement in Chiswick on a wet autumn morning, seeing my shoes kicking through the mulch. I was three and my family had just moved to England from Japan. Maybe I thought something like, “I am here, it is now.”
Who are your heroes?
In childhood, Steve McGarrett in Hawaii 5-0. I had a crush on Steve, so dashing and serious in his suit and tie, and I admired his crime-solving skills. My adult hero is Dolly Parton, for her kindness and her singing.
What book last changed your thinking?
A study by Rosalind Wilkinson of prostitution in 1950s London. She had been commissioned to investigate how to stop women from becoming prostitutes, but she ended up making friends with some of her interviewees and concluded that, given the options, their choice of work was perfectly rational. Women of the Streets (published anonymously because Wilkinson fell out with her superiors) is packed with wonderful quotes, and rich with details of the women’s lives.
Which political figure do you look up to?
An early one was Sheila Cassidy, an English doctor who was arrested and tortured in Chile in 1975 after treating an injured dissident. She went on to campaign against Pinochet’s regime. I was a child in Chile at the time, and I thought her very brave.
What would be your “Mastermind” specialist subject?
Just now: serial killers in Britain, between 1940 and 1960.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
Corfu, I think, in the 1960s. I’d like a goat, a fig tree, white cheese, red wine and to swim in the sea each day.
What TV show can you not live without?
Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel. It makes me feel happy.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“It won’t seem so bad in the morning.” It’s nice to believe and usually true.
What’s currently bugging you?
Leaf blowers? Virgin Media? I’m not feeling very irritable at the moment – perhaps the giant problems in the world are too distracting.
What single thing would make your life better?
I have learned to take some pleasure in tasks that I used to avoid – tidying, washing up, hoovering. But I would love someone else to deal with my home maintenance, financial admin and technical glitches, which I have not grown out of hating. Maybe I am still irritable, after all.
When were you happiest?
On a cold sunny day in 2002, pushing my eight-week-old son up the hill in a buggy to my mother’s house, past the building in which my parents and I had lived with my grandparents when I was born. I’d had a turbulent few weeks, and suddenly I felt full of joy.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
I’d like to be an actor. It must be amazing to inhabit someone else and oneself at the same moment. As a writer, you try to imagine other people’s lives, but it will always be more abstract, less visceral.
Are we all doomed?
Individually, of course. Collectively, I hope not, not yet.
Kate Summerscale’s “The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place” is published by Bloomsbury. She will appear at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 24 November
[See also: Israel and Iran’s final reckoning]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break