Bloomsbury USA
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
Couldn't load pickup availability
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.
Share
Book Details
ISBN:
9780802717429
EAN:
9780802717429
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
400
Authors:
Kate Summerscale
Publisher:
Bloomsbury USA
Published Date: 2009-24-02
View full details
The book is informative re detective development and well written. The murder gruesome. Family history before and after murder helped to visual conditions within the family and of the era.
Thoroughly researched and referenced, with occasional detours into rabbit holes. But I didn't connect with any of the principal players on an emotional level, which would have upped my rating.
This one was well researched, but a little dry. The author chased some rabbits of research that didn’t really contribute to the story at all. It is interesting to note how detectives were once reviled as spies. I guess police have always been under suspicion by the general public.
A sensational tale of murder in Victorian times of a little boy and theinvestigation of his family. A precursor of what was to come in thelate 19th century into the 20th century to the 21st century. It wassad how even though the case didn't go as planned, the investigatorwas proved right years later. Contains violence, sexual situations.Worth a read if you like true crime.
This is my first time reading a book by Summerscale. I had wanted to start with `The Haunting of Alma Fielding' but I was watching one of my favorite movies, 'Dead of Night' a horror anthology from 1944, and the story of Constance and Francis Kent was included as a brief ghost story. It suddenly occurred to me to look it up online and here I am. I have seen the arguments between those who defend this book against charges of dullness by explaining that it's NONFICTION and those who think that is no excuse. I am in the latter camp. I have read nonfiction crime books that were amazingly entertaining. Summerscale adds so many unnecessary and trivial details that it can only be padding. Instead of attempting to inhabit her (real life) characters and create a smooth narrative--she simply tells it as it happened. She fails to create any tension or inspire any emotional reaction. I understand that she had facts she needed to adhere to, but I think there is still a way to create a compelling narrative while staying true to facts. Summerscale, in my opinion, has failed to do so. She has taken a horrific mystery and done the unforgivable--made it a chore to read.
