The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

I think my biggest struggle with this book was that it was two (or maybe three) books in one. Both books were books that I think I could have loved, but the whole was way, way less than the sum of its parts. The two stories kept getting tangled up in each other – tripping up the tension and stealing the narrative thread.

The first story is, of course, the Murder at Road Hill House. This insanely gruesome real life murder is, as billed, like something out of a mystery novel: Locked Victorian house, bizarre forensic findings, no apparent motive, Victorian family with closets packed full of a skeleton for everyone.

The second story, which is what I was really hoping for, is an analysis on the rise of the “detective.” I have a weakness for the Super Smart Detective, who figures out terrible crimes using only his powers of deduction. I'm particularly fond of the Victorian instantiation of the same. I loved Sherlock Holmes before Holmes was cool (again). So I was super into this idea. And Summerscale does explore it, using Mr. Whicher as an exemplary case, who at one point was one of the foremost authorities of Scotland Yard. And this part is fascinating. There's lots of cool linguistics exploring the development of the vocabulary of the modern detective. Unfortunately, it's pretty sparse.

So if both parts are sparse, what makes up the majority of the book? Summerscale is addicted to the details, which sounds like a good thing, but becomes tedious quickly. Did you want to know literally every known address for Mr. Whicher over the course of his entire life? Literally every single contemporary piece of literature that even vaguely references a detective and how it might be influenced by Mr. Whicher? Every job the governess had before and after the murder? The book covered every action of every family member for the rest of their lives to an absurd extreme – fifty years after the principal events, we're reading about fights that the deceased's brother, now a middle-aged ornery scientist, is having with his scientific colleagues about the categorization of Australian fish (which yes, is another book I'd read, but does not belong in this one!)