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Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestselling account of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable--that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today . . . from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.
Author Notes
Kate Summerscale is a journalist and international bestselling author. Her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay , won the Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now Costa) biography prize. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher , a New York Times bestseller, won the Samuel Johnson prize, the British Book Awards for both Popular Non-Fiction and Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime in the US. Mrs Robinson's Disgrace was a Sunday Times bestseller, and The Wicked Boy won the 2017 Mystery Writers of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
When I first read about the Road Hill House murder, in a Victorian true-crime anthology in the London Library, I knew at once that I wanted to write about it. In the summer of 1860 the murder of a three-year-old boy at his home in Wiltshire had created a national frenzy of suspicion and anxiety, an obsessive curiosity that Wilkie Collins dubbed "detective fever". Though the child's killer was evidently a member of his household, the Wiltshire police proved unable to identify the culprit. After a public outcry, Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard - the best man in the first detective squad in the English-speaking world - was sent to investigate. Within a year the case had destroyed his career. I soon discovered that Whicher was not only a pioneer of police detection, but a model for one of the earliest, most influential sleuths in fiction: Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. Whicher seemed the model of the modern detective hero: he was laconic, understated, idiosyncratic, stubborn; a sharp judge of character; liable to antagonise his suspects and his superiors; guided both by hunches and by logical brilliance; and touched by sadness in his own past. His experience at Road Hill drove him to despair and, eventually, a breakdown. I wrote a proposal for a biography of Jack Whicher, which was submitted to publishers. The book was commissioned, and I began my research in earnest. I read police histories; mystery and sensation novels; the newspaper coverage of the Road Hill case. I studied the Metropolitan Police files on the murder, held by the National Archives, and the letters the public had sent to Scotland Yard about the crime. I searched digitised newspapers for details of the cases that Whicher had investigated before Road Hill: murders, frauds, assassination plots, hoaxes, confidence tricks. I read character sketches of him by Dickens and others. For the facts of his life, I trawled through police records, census returns, records of marriages, deaths, births and baptisms. But when I began to write up Whicher's life, I stalled. Every opening I wrote fell flat. It seemed that a biography couldn't do what I wanted this book to do: not just investigate detective fever but recreate it. I needed a different form for the story. At about this time I interviewed the novelist PD James at her house in London. We talked about detective fiction. Her novels have many of the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery, and of the Road Hill case: the detective is faced with a closed circle of suspects, most of them with something to hide, and in the course of his investigation he unearths dark domestic secrets and enigmatic clues. It struck me that the Road Hill murder was itself an archetype of the detective genre, and I decided to try writing my story in the form that it had helped to inspire: the crime novel. I would begin with the murder and the investigation's launch, relating the events from Whicher's point of view, revealing to the reader only as much as the detective knew at any given moment. Like PD James, I would attend to everyday detail, as if the mystery had made the wider scene alive with hidden meaning. Since I still wanted to produce a strictly factual book, I'd need much more information. I visited Road (now Rode) and the neighbouring towns and villages; I looked up weather and harvest reports in local papers, studied the layout and routines of the house. To reconstruct a day-by-day schedule of Whicher's movements, I consulted his expense accounts; and to follow the workings of his mind, I read his reports to the police commissioner at Scotland Yard. I would unfold the story as it unfolded to him, in all its strangeness and frustration. By seeing the case through Whicher's eyes, I found myself identifying with him in other, often consoling ways. There were parallels between his work and mine. I, too, was returning to a scene in which something terrible had taken place, and trying to dig up and decode the past. Like Whicher, I needed to distinguish the meaningful evidence from the red herrings, and then to put the facts in a sequence that told a story. The public vilification of Whicher - for vulgar speculation, for invading a family's privacy - illuminated the troubling aspects of my project. My confusions and doubts about the facts echoed his far more harrowing difficulties in solving the crime. If Whicher helped me to write my book, he also helped me to finish it. When I reread his reports to Scotland Yard, I realised that the whole of his theory about the killing had not been made public. To conclude the story, and satisfy my detective fever, I made even his suspicions my own. Join John Mullan for a discussion with Kate Summerscale at 7pm on Wednesday 16 January in the Scott Room, the Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU - Kate Summerscale Caption: Captions: To order a copy of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher for pounds 4.79 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 I soon discovered that [Jonathan Whicher] was not only a pioneer of police detection, but a model for one of the earliest, most influential sleuths in fiction: Sergeant Cuff in [Wilkie Collins]'s The Moonstone. Whicher seemed the model of the modern detective hero: he was laconic, understated, idiosyncratic, stubborn; a sharp judge of character; liable to antagonise his suspects and his superiors; guided both by hunches and by logical brilliance; and touched by sadness in his own past. His experience at Road Hill drove him to despair and, eventually, a breakdown. I wrote a proposal for a biography of Jack Whicher, which was submitted to publishers. I would begin with the murder and the investigation's launch, relating the events from Whicher's point of view, revealing to the reader only as much as the detective knew at any given moment. Like PD James, I would attend to everyday detail, as if the mystery had made the wider scene alive with hidden meaning. Since I still wanted to produce a strictly factual book, I'd need much more information. I visited Road (now Rode) and the neighbouring towns and villages; I looked up weather and harvest reports in local papers, studied the layout and routines of the house. To reconstruct a day-by-day schedule of Whicher's movements, I consulted his expense accounts; and to follow the workings of his mind, I read his reports to the police commissioner at Scotland Yard. I would unfold the story as it unfolded to him, in all its strangeness and frustration. - Kate Summerscale.
New York Review of Books Review
FACT and fiction do not so much blur as bleed into each other in "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," Kate Summerscale's fastidious reconstruction and expansive analysis of the Road Hill murder case, which centered on an infamous crime that had all of England reeling in the summer of 1860. In the early morning of June 29, someone crept into the nursery of Road Hill House, Samuel and Mary Kent's grand home in the village of Road, and stole off with their 3-yearold son, Saville. Only hours after the alarm was raised by the nursemaid, the child was discovered, his throat deeply cut and his dead body tossed down the servants' outdoor privy. It was, Summerscale says, "perhaps the most disturbing murder of its time." Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the eight original officers of Scotland Yard's detective force, honored among his colleagues as "the prince of detectives," was sent down from London to this heavily industrialized region in the south of England to bring some professionalism to the local investigation. But this was no open-and-shut case - there was no obvious motive for the murder of a child, there were no witnesses at all, and critical clues were lost or compromised - and therein lies its real significance. With no quick and easy resolution to the mystery, Whicher was forced to dig into the private affairs of the Kent household, unearthing secrets and advancing speculations that, in Summerscale's view, were profoundly threatening to English society's notions of itself. The case became "a kind of myth," she says, "a dark fable about the Victorian family and the dangers of detection." Once lodged in the collective imagination, the murder drew comment not only from the hyperventilating press and outraged guardians of public safety and morality, but from literary lights of the day. Dickens proposed his own theory to his friend Wilkie Collins, and both made pointed use of the case in later novels. (For the true lit-hist-myst buff, to reread "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" or "The Moonstone" directly after "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" is akin to having an epiphany.) Summerscale, formerly the literary editor of The Daily Telegraph, goes so far as to say that the real-life investigation "set the course of detective fiction." Two years after the murder, her point was made by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose hugely popular novel "Lady Audley's Secret" drew heavily on the particulars of the case to provide a blueprint for what came to be known as the sensation novel. The scene of the crime: floor plans for Road Hill House, where the 3-year-old Saville Kent was murdered. Taking her own literary cue, Summerscale smartly uses an energetic narrative voice and a suspenseful pace, among other novelistic devices, to make her factual material read with the urgency of a work of fiction. What she has constructed, specifically, is a traditional country-house mystery, more brutal than cozy, but presenting the same kind of intellectual puzzle as her fictional models and adorned, as such books once were, with wonderfully old-fashioned maps, diagrams, engravings, courtroom sketches and other illustrations. (Even the scholarly notes might be looked on as hidden clues, leading the reader to discover such gems as Richard D. Altick's "Victorian Studies in Scarlet" and Thomas Boyle's "Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead") More important, Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society, from prevailing attitudes about women ("prone to insanity"), children ("full of savage whims and impulses," according to one 19th-century physician) and servants ("outsiders who might be spies or seducers") to the morality-based intellectual constructs that codified such views of human behavior. But the spirit of scientific enlightenment was also flourishing in this industrialized period. People were already infatuated with police detectives ("a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest") and morbidly curious about the advances in criminal psychology and forensic procedures. For a nation of armchair detectives, the prolonged and very public Scotland Yard investigation was like a teaching manual in the new forensic sciences. As Summerscale puts it, "The Road Hill case turned everyone detective." More good thinking is applied to the significance of Inspector Whicher's failure to verify his strong suspicions about the killer's identity and bring that person to trial. (It would take five years and a full confession to convict the murderer and vindicate Whicher, whose once lofty reputation was in shreds.) Like any novelist, Summerscale follows her storytelling instincts in making the detective the hero of her book. While her efforts to humanize his sketchy character are limited at best, she does far better at illustrating how he was fictionally transformed, both in the mysteries of his own day and in subsequent permutations of the genre. More dramatic than Whicher's personal fall from public grace was the disillusionment with Scotland Yard and its methods. As the police investigation dragged on, with more and more secrets in the Kent household being aired, even the most avid voyeur could see that criminal detection held hidden dangers. The mania that Wilkie Collins called "detective fever" suddenly shifted to "distaste for the working-class fellow who had meddled in middle-class affairs" and the fear that such troublemakers might eventually breach the sanctity of one's own home and mess all over the drawing-room carpet, as W. H. Auden put it in his classic essay "The Guilty Vicarage." In life as in detective fiction, such fears are not unfounded, for as Summerscale points out, "the classic country-house murder is an assault on propriety, an aggressive exposure of base needs and desires." Which is why the author's startling final twist both vindicates her fallen hero and advances an "aggressive" attack on moral hypocrisy in his day and ours. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins made pointed use of this murder investigation in their novels. Marilyn Stasio writes the Crime column for the Book Review.