The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective Kindle Edition

More than one reviewer has complained of the vast amount of content in this book. Yes, it is a cornucopia of information. Almost too much so. I love true crime especially historical true crime and this mystery is both heartbreaking and compelling. All the elements of great story are here. A sharp detective, a tragic crime, a dysfunctional family. Like the Lizzie Borden case, a mystery with both horror and fascination. This book delivers on a lot of fronts. It is well researched, well written and well paced. It is like a two for one deal. You get both a true crime mystery and a historical outline of Victorian detectives, both literary and real. With a background of  The Moonstone  hovering in the wings this book delves into the Victorian era with grace and agility. (It would be good to go check The Moonstone out before or after reading this book to bring all the info full circle.)However, sometimes too much of good thing can make you sick. Or in this case overcome the reader into an information coma. I love history, I love information, I love all those books that give you insight into the era, the psyche of the people, the little tidbits of information that can really make the past come alive. Here however, Kate Summerscale has a problem of information overload. Instead of summarizing vast amounts of info into something concise and readable, long quotes and details are inserted into the narrative that threaten to bog it and the reader down. Details and quotes about the house, locked and unlocked windows, who ate what, rumors, wash, etc. There were many points along the way that I skipped ahead because I just couldn't contain all the info thrown at me. Unlike the delicate prose of David McCullough who has a gift for making history seem like reading a fiction novel, Summerscale tends more towards the research paper. That's fine if you like that kind of writing but I have read enough books to know that too much info, even for an avid reader like me, can lose a reader. It needs to be more subtly presented to really become 5 star. It is obvious that the author did her homework and was very thorough so I am grateful for her time and energy. Now she needs a slightly more poetic editor to help her make it into a masterpiece.

If you had asked me before I read this book if I knew anything about the murder of Francis Saville Kent, I would have blithely said that I knew all about it. After all I had read the Rhode book-- The case of Constance Kent, (Famous trials series ) , a famous cases anthology that contained a section on it and two novels that took the facts of the case as a jumping off place-- one by Francis King,  ACT OF DARKNESS . which transposes the story to 1930's India, and won the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award.However, I had no idea about the effect that this murder had on the public-- well, they were said to be outraged, but no one mentioned people driving through the property like it was on a modern tour route of scenes of famous murders. Further, the public (including Charles Dickens) speculated about it like a group of people on a true crime newsgroup going over and over the murder of Jon Benet Rameey. Individuals would write at times libelous letters to the press and the police with their own theories about the identity of the murderer and how the murder was accomplished.If there are some facts about the murder that I would have liked to have included-- if they exist, they relate only to the particular strain of "Detective Fever" that I suffer from and not because the author advances any particular theory as "the" theory of the case. While she does do some speculation based on a line in a letter that might have been written or dictated by a member of the family in 1926 and sent to Rhode after the publication of his book-- it seems a bit medically dubious. She also doesn't try to deal with the very puzzling evidence of the lack of blood splatter as well as the mysterious bloody shift found by the police. She isn't an advocate as much as a reporter of the effect this murder had on the society of the period.Although she regards the case as mostly solved, I still feel that some of the statements she writes in her paragraphs on Dickens' last, unfinished novel,  Bleak House , could apply as well to the murder of a 3 year old boy in 1860 at a place called Road-Hill House.

This is a dramatically written account of a very high profile murder in a large middle class household in Wiltshire in 1860, which caused a nationwide sensation. A 3 year old boy, Francis Saville Kent, is found missing from his nursery and his body found stuffed down an outside privy, having been stabbed and possibly suffocated. Mr Whicher is one of the inaugural detectives appointed by Scotland Yard back in 1842 and now an experienced detective with a nuanced appreciation of the criminal mind, called in to investigate the crime. He attempts to identify the murderer and, in what is now a fictional detective cliche, antagonises the local police by coming up with different potential solutions. Almost every member of the Kent family and servants is suspected by someone or other of involvement. The main theories coalesce around an accidental death caused by the child catching his father Samuel Kent in bed with one of the servants, and murder of the child due to sibling jealousy on the part of Constance and possibly William Kent, 16 and 15 year old children of Samuel Kent by his first wife. Whicher favours the second explanation, and Constance is summoned before magistrates but there is not enough evidence for her to be committed to trial. The mystery remains unsolved.....until five years later when Constance confesses her guilt. There are still holes in her story and the public and press are reluctant to believe in the guilt of such a young woman, but she is tried and sentenced to death, though this is commuted to 20 years penal servitude after a national outcry. Constance was released after her penal servitude and followed her brother William to Australia where she became a nurse and lived to see her 100th birthday under a false identity - though these facts were only found out by her descendants in the 1970s. This book is much more than just an account of this dramatic crime, it is also a history of crime and society in the mid 19th century and there is a lot of detail of other cases in which the highly esteemed Whicher was involved, and also comparisons with the growing literary genres of sensationalist and detective fiction during the 1850s and 60s, especially with Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Inspector Bucket in Dickens's Bleak House. I thought the book sagged a bit in the middle and become a bit repetitive with the hammering home of some of these theories, but overall this was a fascinating read.

Infinitely researched and every sentence is included, which means that this is the dullest book ever written. It reads like an intellectual exercise, a thesis, and who reads those?At the heart of this is the murder of a toddler, so you would think there would be some empathy, compassion maybe but there's not, it's just ice cold and full of bland facts and quotes.The equivalent of looking at great art, and admiring the frame it sits in. Hugely researched, but so what....

A fantastically well-researched book, with some good storytelling. My main criticism is that it seems to be three different books in one: a factual, very well-researched retelling of a young child's murder, and the process of getting to the truth of it; a history of the rise and role of the detective in real life and also in fiction; and a biography of Whicher himself. For me it was a bit frustrating finding entire chapters of information not directly related to the case (such as previous successes or failures of detectives, or quotes from various books of the time). If you are happy to either plough through, or even skip some sections then I recommend this book.

"The Suspicions of Mr Whicher" details an investigation into a child murder which took place in 1860 at Road Hill House in Wiltshire. As the author Kate Summerscale makes clear from the start this was the first highly publicised 'who dunnit' style murder mystery to fascinate the press and the British public. This true life case became the original inspiration for every fictional detective novel written since.Where this book is strongest is describing the details of the murder itself, the people involved and the investigation carried out by the detective Jack Whicher. It is an interesting case in itself, being a classic locked door mystery where you know that at least one member of the household committed the crime.The background detail on the foundation of the Metropolitan Police detective service is fascinating. I especially liked the conflict of Victorian morality that objected to police officers being dressed in plain clothes and poking their noses into the affairs of respectable folk.However, the actual substance of the murder and investigation only accounts for perhaps half of this book. The other half seemed to me to be no better than padding. False leads, eccentric amateur detectives and unnecessary background about those involved makes the narrative drag in places. The last few chapters of the book are especially tiresome as it describes the lives of the surviving family members far beyond any relevance to the murder case.Although Kate Summerscale has obviously painstakingly reseached Victorian detective literature and does a good job of referring to this throughout, I would have preferred to have seen more detail about how the case had such an impact on the birth of sensationalist journalism. No reference is made to the later Ripper murders which had a similar handling by a press hungry to sell newspapers by dramatising and revelling in the details of particularly gruesome crimes."The Suspicions of Mr Whicher" is well worth reading, but it does have its flaws. It's front cover proclaims it "the Richard and Judy number one bestseller" as though that was the equivalent of the Pulitzer. If you want to know more about early Victorian policing and the birth of detective literature though you should find this an interesting and intriguing book which is also easy and enjoyable to read.

Reading this, I felt that the style (and the subject) was more suited to a shorter magazine article.Sometimes it would be getting to an interesting bit in the story, when it would veer off on a tangent. Of course, you were looking forward to the detective arriving at the house to see what he would do, but there were too many diversions onto topics of what life was like in those days - it seemed like they needed to pad the book out with something.Of course the story itself is frustratingly lacking in an easy solution, which you might expect from a true story. There are some clear pointers about what the author thinks happened, but you are left to draw conclusions about things, which in an age before forensic science and DNA, we will probably never know the answers to.But it is an attempt at something interesting and the story is less well known than other famous crimes of the time (e.g. the ripper murders), so it does merit telling.