Dying on stage and off in a lurid Victorian chiller

PETER Ackroyd’s 1994 murder mystery Dan Leno And The Limehouse Golem, set in a bawdy and filthy Victorian London of music halls and sex workers, is a hitand-miss affair in its own right.

It’s no surprise then that in adapting it for the big screen KickAss writer Jane Goldman suffers a few mis-steps.

However the biggest change she makes – putting a peripheral police detective centre stage – works well enough, and both the performances from the strong cast and the imagemaking of director Juan Carlos Medina raise this 2016 chiller above the usual run-of-the-mill historical serial killer fare.

That police detective is John Kildare, played here by Bill Nighy who stepped in after illness prevented Alan Rickman from taking the role. Rickman died of cancer in January 2016, two months after shooting finished.

Kildare is given the unenviable job of solving a gruesome quadruple murder which appears to be a copycat of the infamous Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 – slayings later examined by Thomas De Quincey in his famous 1827 essay On Murder Considered As One Of The Fine Arts (and you’ll also find them cropping up in Alan Moore’s celebrated graphic novel From Hell).

Other murders attributed to the same killer have seen him dubbed ‘the Golem’ by terrified locals, a reference to clues left at the scene of the murder of a Jewish scholar in Limehouse.

At the same time, London bobby

George Flood (Daniel Mays) finds himself arresting former music hall star Elizabeth Cree (Olivia Cooke) for the murder of her husband, John (Sam Reid).

Are the two cases linked? Kildare starts to think so and, with Flood now deputising as his sleuthing assistant, he delves into the Cree case.

And so, through flashbacks and testimonies, we learn from Elizabeth how she met her husband and the part played in her life by the great Dan Leno (George Booth), a famous music hall comedian who specialises in playing women.

One of the joys of Ackroyd’s novel is that Leno was a real person, and the re-imagining of history doesn’t stop there. Kildare finds a British Library copy of De Quincey’s work defaced by weird drawings and symbols and what seems like a confession, and deduces the killer must be one of four men with access to that copy.

As well as Cree it turns out they include novelist George Gissing, and a certain German born philosopher by the name of Karl Marx. Morgan Watkins and Henry Goodman play Gissing and Marx, while Eddie Marsan and Maria Valverde also feature. Not a masterpiece, but diverting enough.