The Barnes & Noble Review
Sometime in the wee hours of June 29, 1860, in Road Hill House in Wiltshire, England, Saville Kent, a child of three, was taken from his cot beside his nursemaid’s bed and murdered. His body was discovered hours later in the servants’ outdoor privy. His throat had been slit and his chest bore a deep knife wound; there were cuts on his hands and signs of smothering. An open drawing-room window might have suggested that the culprit had entered from the grounds, but police investigation showed that to be physically impossible. It was clear, alas, that the murderer was one of the family members or servants who slept in the house that fatal night.
This murder lies at the center of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, and it could be called a perfect crime: not because the perpetrator escaped detection but because its particulars perfectly captured and intensified key anxieties and preoccupations of its time and place. Not only did it represent a violation of the Victorian tabernacle, the home, but as an inside job, it fed a lurking unease that the sacred haven of privacy was also an incubator of passion, a realm of secrecy and unwholesome deeds. "Perhaps," Summerscale writes, summarizing this feeling, "privacy was a source of sin, the condition that enabled the sweet domestic scene to rot from its core."
Was something rotten at Road Hill? Possibly. The head of the family, Samuel Kent, was on his second wife, the family’s former governess, who, it was suggested, had usurped the first Mrs. Kent before the death of that lady, who was said to be mad. Had Samuel transferred his affections yet again, this time to his young son’s nursemaid? Had the illicit couple been "intriguing," as Charles Dickens put it, in her bed in the nursery that night? Dickens was fascinated by the case -- all over it like Inspector Bucket -- and set out his views in a letter to Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White was being serialized as events unfolded at Road Hill House: "Poor little child wakes in Crib, and sits up, contemplating blissful proceedings. Nursemaid strangles him then and there. Mr. Kent gashes body to mystify discoverers, and disposes of same."
One person who did not buy this scenario was Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, sent from London a couple of weeks after the murder. To be sure, he too found domestic arrangements in Road Hill House worth pondering. Kent’s four children by his first marriage clearly ranked lower than the three of his second, and there was evidence of resentment. Whicher’s prime suspect, one of the less-favored children, had a history of daring, disruptive behavior and possible madness. Though you will not learn who Whicher fingered from me, Summerscale does not, in fact, make much of a secret of it. She follows Whicher’s investigation, and, thanks to his doggedness and acumen, he knows -- and we know -- halfway through the book who is the villain.
Not that this knowledge did the ace sleuth much good -- quite the reverse. Before Whicher had arrived on the scene, the local police had thoroughly bungled the case, in great part out of class deference. They had searched both the persons and belongings of the servants but did not subject the Kent family members to similar unpleasantness. Whicher, however, did not recognize such distinctions when it came to ferreting out the truth. His snooping -- which extended deep into the family’s dirty laundry -- bore fruit and inspired one newspaper to pronounce that the "whole moral interior of the house ought to be laid bare to the public gaze." But Whicher’s investigations also outraged public sensibilities, fuelling the horror that a mere functionary could go fossicking through a respectable family’s most private effects. The feeling of desecration carried into the arraignment hearing, the defense depicting Whicher, in Summerscale’s words, as "vulgar, greedy, rapacious" and "a clumsy, lower-class despoiler of a virginal innocent." The suspect was freed and Whicher’s career was badly damaged. He was denounced in Parliament, and lived in bitterness for almost five years. Then he was thoroughly vindicated, in a manner I shall leave you to discover.
Summerscale says she has modeled her book on "the country-house mystery." Certainly, the story she tells is absorbing in its attention to character, material detail, and the relation between the several players. She adds her own deductions, going beyond the final verdict to show that the guilty party most likely did not act alone and to suggest who was the probable accomplice. She also puts forward a most unsavory hypothesis at book’s end that is satisfyingly, if shockingly, plausible. What is more, she provides floor plans, so essential to the country-house mystery, as well as a family tree, list of characters, little maps, sketches, and wonderful photographs to pore over.
Still, the book is something less than a mystery -- and more. Summerscale’s real focus is cultural and psychological. She shows how the murder, its domestic context, and the process of detection matched both a darkening mood in the country concerning the family and a general distaste for and fascination with criminal investigation. She would also like to show that the Road Hill case not only "inspired 'detective fever' throughout England" but actually "set the course of detective fiction" and "helped shape the fiction of the 1860s and beyond, most obviously Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone." This will not convince those who have actually read that great novel -- to say nothing of Dickens’s Bleak House (serialized 1852-53) or Collins’s earlier stories in which horrid family secrets and detectives abound. And perhaps it won’t convince those who haven’t either, for even as Summerscale lays out her arguments for the decisive influence of the Road Hill House case on the direction of fiction, she provides more than sufficient evidence to disprove the notion. It is clear by her own account that public fascination with the case and the appearance of The Moonstonewere simply two aspects of the same mid-Victorian temper. Be that as it may, both as a story and an analysis of a historical mood, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a thumping good read. --Katherine A. Powers
Katherine A. Powers writes the literary column "A Reading Life" for the Boston Sunday Globe and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From the Publisher
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.
Publishers Weekly
Summerscale (The Queen of Whale Cay) delivers a mesmerizing portrait of one of England's first detectives and the gruesome murder investigation that nearly destroyed him. In 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent was found murdered in the outdoor privy of his family's country estate. Local police scrambled for clues, but to no avail. Scotland Yard Det.-Insp. Jonathan "Jack" Whicher was called in and immediately suspected the unthinkable: someone in the Kent family killed Saville. Theories abounded as everyone from the nursemaid to Saville's father became a suspect. Whicher tirelessly pursued every lead and became convinced that Constance Kent, Saville's teenage half-sister, was the murderer, but with little evidence and no confession, the case went cold and Whicher returned to London, a broken man. Five years later, the killer came forward with a shocking account of the crime, leading to a sensational trial. Whicher is a fascinating hero, and readers will delight in following every lurid twist and turn in his investigation. (Apr.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal
An English country house, a ghastly child murder, family secrets, a brilliant detective-all the elements of a Victorian crime novel are here in this true account of a celebrated murder in 1860. On June 29, three-year-old Saville Kent was found with his throat slashed in the servant's privy at Road Hill House. An incompetent police investigation proved fruitless, so the magistrate called in London detective James Whicher. Detectives, who investigated crimes across different police districts, were viewed with both awe and suspicion; their investigations often threatened the sacred privacy of the home. Whicher was certain that a member of the family had murdered the child, but a flat denial and the outrage of the community sent him back to London in disgrace. Later developments proved him right, but Whicher's real claim to fame was as the template for fictional detectives, particularly Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone . Summerscale organizes the book like a period novel, with a denouement that suggests that full justice was never done. Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City ) fans will be enthralled. For public and academic libraries.-Deirdre Bray Root, Middletown P.L.
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
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 (The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of ‘Joe' Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water, 1997, etc.). She models this engaging true-crime tale on the traditional country-house murder mystery, packed with secretive family members moving about with hidden motives in a commodious old manor house. On June 30, 1860, in the Wiltshire village of Road, three-year-old Saville Kent was removed in the dead of night from his cot in the room he shared with his nursemaid, suffocated, stabbed and dumped in the privy outside the kitchen. In addition to his parents, Samuel and Mary Kent, the inhabitants of Road Hill House included numerous servants and Samuel's four children from his previous marriage, each harboring various grievances since their mother's untimely death. After the local constable made a mess of the investigation, authorities called in Scotland Yard's "prince of detectives," Jonathan Whicher, then at the height of his career at age 45. The author dispassionately presents highlights from the record of Whicher's interviews with servants and family members, allowing readers to fill in the blanks much as the detective had to do. On largely circumstantial evidence, he arrested Samuel's 16-year-old daughter Constance, but she was soon released, and thepress ridiculed Whicher for accusing an innocent girl. In 1865, however, she confessed to the crime and after a sensational trial served a 20-year prison sentence. 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.
(3 ratings)
A reviewer
much too long and very disappointing
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