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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective | 
 enlarge | Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Walker & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $7.50
You Save: $17.45 (70%)
New (51) Used (31) from $7.50
Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 3953
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.5
ISBN: 0802715354
Dewey Decimal Number: 364.1523094231
EAN: 9780802715357
ASIN: 0802715354
Publication Date: April 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The dramatic story 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 great true crime story! April 21, 2008
David W. Straight (knoxville, tennessee United States)
67 out of 69 found this review helpful
This is a wonderfully done true crime story of a murder in England in 1860. If that were all, we'd have an eminently enjoyable book. But this is also a social commentary and a history of the early detective story: you'll learn how and when the words "clueless" and "sleuth" entered the language, for example. You have a horrible murder of a 3-year-old boy in a manor house in the country. The outside doors, windows, and gates are all locked--and also, unusual for us nowadays, many of the interior doors were locked as well--preventing access to the larder, cellar, drawing-room, etc. So suspicion perforce falls upon the family and servants. This is before the days of forensic science--so it isn't even clear whether the child was killed by stabbing, throat-cutting, suffocation, or drowning. The local constabulary in this west England area are inadequate to the task in what very quickly becomes a sensationalist case, and so a detective from London is called in to investigate.
Detectives are new, only a couple of decades old, as are detective stories. Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher is Scotland Yard's best investigator (at the time, there weren't all that many). The child's family is not very well liked in the area, and the family itself has many unsavory secrets--including insanity. Summerscale relates Whicher's detective work and his growing fixation upon a 16-year-old sister. But what makes all of this particularly enjoyable is how Summerscale relates the sensationalism in the press, the plethora of theories as to the murder, the coming-forth of outsiders to confess, the initial belief in Whicher's abilities (followed by growing disbelief). There are wonderful descriptions of the detective novels of the time--including ones with female detectives--the public appetite for these stories, and the additions to the language (you'll see where clue/clew comes from). The child's nanny slept in the room with the child, who was taken during the night. Charles Dickens was one of the numerous people who put forth the theory that the child had discovered his father in bed with the nanny and had been killed to prevent him telling Mama. Actual solutions, however, were not readily forthcoming.
Whicher fell out of favor in the public eye--but he did pop up again in the other sensational case of the era--the Tichborne Claimant. (Hopefully, Summerscale will turn her prodigious talents to that case next). So what you get here is a fascinating view of the early days of detectivedom (if that's a word), the detective in fact and fiction, and the public's taste in literature. The book reads like a good detective novel, with well-portrayed characters: there are arrests, trials, maps, drawings, and photographs. A great book indeed!
Fascinating account of a forgotten murder May 2, 2008
David W. Nicholas (Montrose, CA USA)
26 out of 26 found this review helpful
We always think of detectives and crime-solving as things that have gone on for centuries. In actual fact, Edgar Alan Poe invented the detective story in 1841, and the next year the British set up their first detective police to solve crimes where the criminal wasn't immediately apparent. For much of the 19th century these individuals were essentially making it up as they went along, and dealing with a variety of public prejudices (bobbies originally had to wear their uniforms all the time, to avoid corruption and the possibility of them sneaking up on someone) and strange practices to invent, as they went along, the craft of crime-solving.
In 1860, 18 years after the detective department was founded (they had offices in a square in downtown London known as Scotland Yard, hence the name) a young boy was killed in rural England. His throat was cut rather viciously, and he was thrown into a privy. The house in which he lived with his family was very large, and since the doors were locked, it seemed inevitable that the killer must be either a family member or a servant. After two weeks of inexpert investigation, which solved nothing, the local police petitioned London to send a Scotland Yard detective. The one they got was one of four Detective Inspectors, Jack Whicher, who according to the author was one of the original detectives who essentially invented his craft. His assistant, "Dolly" Williamson, went on to be superintendent of Scotland Yard during the `70s and `80s.
Whicher settled pretty quickly on who he believed was the culprit, but he was unable to obtain a confession and had scant physical evidence. He made an arrest, but the family closed ranks, and ultimately there was no immediate conclusion to the killing. This destroyed Whicher's career. He wound up retiring from the police a few years later, and worked intermittently as a private detective in later years. Eventually he was vindicated, and the case wrapped up, but he was never reinstated.
I enjoyed this book immensely. So much of what the author recounts found its way into detective novels of later years that it's amusing, to say the least. The characters are interesting, and so are their fates. I enjoyed this book immensely, and would recommend it to anyone interested in true crime.
The original English manor house murder mystery May 12, 2008
Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
When I was young I used to read many mystery novels, and a lot of them originated in England. Invariably the murder was soved by the detective getting everyone together and revealing how the murder was done, and "who done it". It seemed that these were the only type of British mysteries being written, and I often wondered how this particular niche of the genre got started. This extremely well-written book has finally answered that question, and also tells an exciting true murder story. We get the origination of the detective in England, and also the origin of some of the words we see all the time in mysteries, such as "clue" or "sleuth". The detective has the facts of the murder, but couldn't prove it, and it destroyed his career in law enforcement. The solution only came several years later, and did not involve any police force. Even when the tale is almost done, the writer leaves us with the feeling that there was at least one other participant in the murder who was never brought to justice. Often life does not imitate art! This is an exciting book, and I highly recommend it.
Superb June 26, 2008
K. Huff (New York, NY)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is the true story of a murder that took place at Road Hill House in the English countryside. One night, at the end of June, 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent was found dead in the privy of his family's estate, his neck severed. A week later, Detective Jack Whicher, of Scotland Yard, arrived on the scene, and promptly determined that Saville's half sister Constance, age 16, committed the horrible crime. What followed was a ghastly revealing of one family's secrets in an era when the family and its home was considered to be sacrosanct.
Summerscale writes as though all this is fiction, and walks us right through the crime, from the time the Kents went to bed on that June evening up through a dramatic trial five years later and beyond. There were a number of brutal murders that took place around the time that London began to have its own specialized detective force, and these detectives were the inspiration for many fictional detectives, Inspector Bucket of Bleak Houseand Sergeant Cuff of The Moonstone (Modern Library Classics), to name just two. Murders such as these were inspiration for much of the sensationalist fiction that was written in the 1850s and `60s; Ellen Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon were just two of the many authors who wrote this kind of "lowbrow" literature.
These murders were especially shocking to mid-Victorian values; as Summerscale points out many times in the course of her narrative, the home was sacred, and any invasion of that privacy was frowned upon far more than it would be today. What was remarkable about the Kents was the fact that their house did not resemble those of other Victorians, with the family living on the lower floors and the servants above. Rather, the servants slept near to the family, with the children of Samuel Kent's first marriage living on the third floor. The fact that Mary Ann, Elizabeth, William, and Constance Kent were treated as inferiors played a large part in the murder investigation, as did a missing nightgown that might have been bloodstained.
The Road Hill House murder shares an eerie resemblance to Jane Eyre, which incidentally had been published the year before: both situations involved mad wives and governesses. Summerscale paints her hard-boiled detective Whicher as determined to get to the truth, no matter the cost to his reputation, and the Kent family one with many secrets to hide. Constance, the accused, is portrayed in a sympathetic light, as is Elizabeth Gough, the governess. In all, this was an absolutely superb book--it reads almost like The Woman in White (Penguin Classics)which, incidentally, was running in installments at this time. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a must read for lovers of the Victorian period. Also try: Lady Audley's Secret, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.
Fascinating story May 6, 2008
Bruce Macbain
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Not only is the murder itself a fascinating puzzle but the author weaves into it the history of Victorian detective fiction and the ways in which reality and fiction interacted to create the figure of the modern 'detective'. Ms. Summerscale seems to have read everything and marshals all her scholarship in very readable form.
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