ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR MARX

By Paul Gray

During one remarkable scene in The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (Doubleday; 261 pages; $22), three men sit side by side in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Gathered together by chance on this foggy September morning in 1880 are Karl Marx, of whom the world will hear more in the coming decades; a young novelist named George Gissing, destined for some success but nothing like Marx's influence; and John Cree, who has inherited enough money to spend his days in earnest research into the conditions of the London poor. So, what happens next? Well, the three men ... read their books.

Only a foolhardy or a thoroughly self-confident novelist would risk such a potential yawn inducer, and Peter Ackroyd decidedly belongs in the second category. The author of biographies of T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens and of seven earlier novels, including The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton, Ackroyd has moved skillfully and often between the provinces of fact and fiction, with particular attention paid to the muzzy, fuzzy border between the two. By the time the historical Marx and Gissing and the imagined Cree sit together in silence in the Reading Room, the books they choose not only define their characters but also contain hints and echoes of a larger story in which all three are unknowingly involved.

A serial killer (as fictional as John Cree) is stalking the Limehouse district of London's East End: two prostitutes, an elderly Jewish scholar and the entire family of a secondhand clothes dealer have been found murdered and grotesquely mutilated. The carnage, screamingly reported in the tabloid press, inspires fear among the citizens and perhaps something else: "It was almost as if they had been waiting impatiently for these murders to happen -- as if the new conditions of the metropolis required some vivid identification, some flagrant confirmation of its status as the largest and darkest city of the world."

Ackroyd unfolds and eventually provides a solution for these crimes through a succession of short chapters and shifting points of view. Much of the attention goes to a woman once known as Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, who escaped poverty by way of the London music halls, giving innocent performances of suggestive songs: I Don't Suppose He'll Do It Again for Months and Months and Months; Don't Stick It Out So Much. Under the tutelage of Dan Leno, London's most beloved comedian and a precursor of Charlie Chaplin, Lizzie became a star and eventually married the newly rich John Cree. In Ackroyd's opening chapter, she is shown being hanged for murdering her husband.

What this introductory execution has to do with the Limehouse murders is, essentially, the question and plot of the novel. Unfortunately, this malange of fiction and fact is longer on intellectual pleasures than emotional resonance. Ackroyd has Dickensian ambitions and tries to show a city full of interlocking coincidences leading inexorably to tragedy. He does so with considerable skill but untimely haste. The intricacies of his plot seem ultimately to trace vectors rather than lives.