The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Ratings30
Average rating3.3
t's 1860. Saville Kent, age three, is murdered in an outdoor privy. The crime horrifies England. It leads to a national obsession that turns the masses into amateur sleuths. Inspector Jonathan Whicher is Britain's best. He realizes right away that the murder was an inside job-and he sees who did it. But Victorians refuse to believe that one family member can kill another. Unable to prove his circumstantial case, Whicher returns discredited to London. Only five years later, he turns out to have been right. But Whicher's real legacy lives on in fiction. He becomes the model for the tough, intuitive detectives that we've loved ever since: the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, the heroes of Law and Order and CSI. Now Kate Summerscale tells the story of the case that inspired the rise of the British mystery novel. This provocative true-crime story reads like a Victorian thriller.
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I'd forgotten how good this is. The unfolding of the story and the use of contemporary detective stories is well done.
Lengthy summary of a famous Victorian murder, when policing and detection were in their infancy. Way too much detail but impressive knowledge of Victorian crime fiction.
Either oversold by the PR department or miss categorized. It is a very competent but rather scholastic and somewhat dry laying out of a milestone true life crime in the mid 19th century, the involvement and evolving of a new branch of Policing called “Detectives” and the falling in love of a nation with Crime, fictional and not. Author does a very thourough job on the crime itself, even too much so, a competent laying out of Scotland Yard's detective branch birth and early evolution, but somewhat lacking in tying it all into a bigger discussion on how it struck a nerve wit the nation.I'm afraid when it came to assigning starts “It was OK” was about right
