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Loading... The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House (original 2008; edition 2008)by Kate Summerscale
Work InformationThe Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale (2008)
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  Charon07 | Apr 22, 2024 |   Either way, I'm not finding it compelling enough to knock any other books off my To Buy TBR list, so I'll just abandon the book at this point. I'm not assigning a star rating, since I think my dissatisfaction has more to do with the format than the quality of the writing or audio performance. DNF at 14%. Borrowed from my public library via Overdrive. Doodlebug34 | Jan 1, 2024 | This was a fascinating account not only of Mr Wicher's investigation, but of the social and class attitudes of the time that hampered the investigation. Due to a combination of bungling by the local police force, the late date at which he was assigned to the case, and the murderer's cool headedness, Wicher was unable to secure a conviction although subsequent events vindicated his identification of the murderer. The follow up information on what became of the perpetrator and other family members was also interesting. And the section on Wicher's early career as a "bobby" in Holborn was fascinating, given that family history research of mine has already revealed an ancestor in the same division around the same time, so I will be following that up. An altogether enjoyable and informative read, so a richly deserved five stars. (  ) kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |  ) nogomu | Oct 19, 2023 |  ) datrappert | Oct 12, 2023 |
 The case has been discussed many times, and Summerscale turns the spotlight on the detective. This would be interesting if she knew more about him, but the material is so threadbare that Whicher cannot buy a railway ticket without our being given a description of Paddington Station. Yet she omits crucial information about the ill-treatment of Constance's brother. Painstaking but never boring recreation of a sensational 1860 murder brings to shivering life the age of the Victorian detective. The Road Hill case served as fodder for the emerging detective genre taken up with relish by such authors as Dickens, Poe and Wilkie Collins. It perplexed detectives at the time and was resolved five years after the deed—and then only partially and unsatisfactorily, avers British journalist and biographer Summerscale.... Summerscale pursues the story over decades, enriching the account with explanations of the then-new detective terminology and methods and suggesting a convincing motive for Constance’s out-of-the-blue confession. A bang-up sleuthing adventure.  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, AwardsNotable Lists
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
True Crime.
Nonfiction.
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 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 Sergeant 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 author Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written. No library descriptions found. 
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)364.1523094231Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Criminology Crimes and Offenses Offenses against persons Homicide Murder History, geographic treatment, biography Europe England & WalesLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.44)
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Wikipedia in English (6)
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Summerscale does a wonderful job of presenting interesting and relevant details without bogging down the history with a lot of boring facts. I typically hate reading history, so maybe this style of telling would disappoint historians, but I found it very engaging, like reading fiction. The notes (aside from a few explanatory notes at the ends of chapters) are endnotes, so I could flip to the back if I wanted to see her sources, or ignore them until a convenient lull in the story. So I guess I can tolerate history after all: just give me a lurid story told like fiction, with historic details inconspicuously tucked away out of sight. (