From Variety – London-based Number 9 Films and the U.K. Film Council are developing an adaptation of Peter Ackroyd’s tome The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (aka Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem) with Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass) set to pen the adaptation.
The crime story takes place in Victorian London and follows a Jack-the Ripper-style serial killer nicknamed the Limehouse Golem and the rise and fall of a vaudeville star.
Book Jacket:
A literary star returns with an addictive tale of murder in Victorian London. Peter Ackroyd is “our most exciting and original writer… one of the few English writers of his generation who will be read in a hundred years’ time.” — The Sunday Times (London).
In the autumn of 1880, a series of brutal murders shake the impoverished London neighborhood of Limehouse. As the merchants, immigrants, and prostitutes of Limehouse panic, the murders attract the attention of three remarkable men of the times: Karl Marx, in his twilight, always under suspicion for being a foreigner, a Jew, and a radical; George Gissing, the struggling author who would go on to write that great indictment of London’s pinchpenny publishing world, New Grub Street; and Dan Leno, the legendary star of the music hall and the precursor of Charlie Chaplin. As the police investigate, the popular press claims the killings are the work of a ‘golem’ – a savage creature of Jewish folklore – but only one woman, Elizabeth Cree, a woman on trial for poisoning her husband, knows the truth behind the murders.
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