The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

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(Hardcover)

Average Customer Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 4 out of 5 (3 ratings)

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  • Publisher: Walker & Company
  • Pub. Date: April 2008
  • ISBN-13: 9780802715357
  • Sales Rank: 105
  • 384pp
 
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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.

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Synopsis

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

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Biography

Kate Summerscale is the former literary editor for the Daily Telegraph and author of The Queen of Whale Cay, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. Summerscale lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Number of Reviews: 3
Average Rating: Customer Rating for this product is 4 out of 5
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Customer Rating for this product is 5 out of 5 A reviewer
A reviewer, A reviewer, 06/10/2008

Kate Summerscale has written a remarkable book, not only recreating in absorbing detail a shocking Victorian murder that reverberated across all of England, but chronicling how her main protagonist--Inspector Jonathan Whicher--became the model for all the great detectives in fiction. Though it's all true, she has written the book in the form of a classic Victorian crime novel, taking us straight back almost 150 years.

Also recommended: The Alienist, by Caleb Carr

Customer Rating for this product is 2 out of 5 much too long and very disappointing
A reviewer, someone who reads many books., 05/25/2008

I really did not enjoy this book, I was so looking forward to reading it after reading all the reviews praising it. I found myself losing interest and merely skipped thru at the end. I think it needed to be edited and some explanations eliminated.

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