The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
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.BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
The Writer Kate Summercale’s nonfiction book, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a true crime of the murder of a little boy named Saville Kent in a murder that became known as the murder at the Road Hill House in July 1860 which is in the region of Somerset in Southwest England. This real-life crime heavily influenced the writings of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins (Summercale 272, 301). The fallout from the Road Hill House affected British Detective Literature for at least a generation (Summercale 282). Jonathan “Jack” Wicher was the Scotland Yard Detective-Inspector who was assigned to the case after a local magistrate asked for help from the British Home Secretary (Summercale 38). I read the book on my Kindle. The book includes black-and-white illustrations. The book includes a section of notes and a bibliography. Summercale’s book covers the true crime of Round Hill House, but the book also covers class, police work in Victorian Britain, the popular view of mental illness in 19th Century Britain, the British family in the 19th Century, Anglicanism, British detective literature, the history of British newspapers, and other topics. Kate Summercale’s book, The Suspicions of Mr. Witcher was an excellent study of the murder at the Round Hill House in July 1860.
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