The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
Kate Summerscale, 2008
Walker & Co.
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802715357
Summary
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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Raised—Japan, England, and Chile
• Education—B.A., Oxford University; M.A., Stanford University
• Awards—Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction; Somerset
Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
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 (From the publisher.)
More
Kate Summerscale is an award-winning English writer and journalist. She is the author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House (about the Constance Kent case), which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction 2008, and the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, 'fastest woman on water', which won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography.
She worked for The Independent and from 1995 to 1996 she wrote and edited obituaries for the Daily Telegraph. She is the former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. Her articles have appeared in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. She has also judged various literary competitions, including the Booker Prize in 2001. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Summerscale has done excellent research in ferreting out the details of this curious case. [She] has come up with a new solution to the puzzle and in doing so has produced a book that deepens and expands the knowledge of what one would have thought was an already over-examined case: a remarkable achievement.
Sunday Times (London)
A fastidious reconstruction and expansive analysis of the Road Hill murder case.... Summerscale smartly uses an energetic narrative voice and a suspenseful pace, among other novelistic devices, to make her factual material read with the urgency of a work of fiction. What she has constructed, specifically, is a traditional country-house mystery, more brutal than cozy, but presenting the same kind of intellectual puzzle as her fictional models and adorned, as such books once were, with wonderfully old-fashioned maps, diagrams, engravings, courtroom sketches and other illustrations.... More important, Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society.... The author's startling final twist both vindicates her fallen hero and advances an ‘aggressive’ attack on moral hypocrisy in his day and ours.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times Book Review
Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is not just a dark, vicious true-crime story; it is the story of the birth of forensic science, founded on the new and disturbing idea that innocent, insignificant domestic details can reveal unspeakable horrors to those who know how to read them.
Lev Grossman - Time
Kate Summerscale’s book is a tour de force. It sweeps us irresistibly into the investigation, turning us into armchair detectives.... Under the spell of [her] scrupulous intelligence and mesmerizing research, we are drawn into a detective story within a detective story that takes us halfway into the 20th century and across the sea to Tasmania before the clues finally add up to what surely must be the last word on the Road Hill Murder.
Daily Mail (UK)
(Starred review.) Summerscale 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.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Library Journal
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 the press 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This book is modelled on the country-house murder mystery, the form that the Road Hill case inspired, and uses some of the devices of detective fiction,” Summerscale writes in her introduction (xiii). How does the form of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher complement its subject? What are some of the “devices” that Summerscale borrows from fiction?
2. Summerscale delves into the vocabulary of detection, from “coppers” (46) to “clue” (68) to “detect” (157). Which word origins were the most surprising and interesting, and why?
3. What role did privacy play in the Road Hill case? How did notions of privacy impede or advance the case? How do Victorian ideas of privacy and domesticity compare to today’s concept of the home?
4. Summerscale lists some of “Whicher’s detective qualities: an excellent memory, an eye for the incongruous, psychological acuity, and confidence” (50). Which of these qualities were apparent in Whicher’s investigation of the Road Hill murder? Which qualities seemed to fail him as the case unraveled?
5. Discuss the importance of class relations to the Road Hill case. What was the relationship between the Kent family and the villagers of Road? What were the sources of class tension between Whicher and the local police?
6. How was the Road Hill murder case a product of its time? What features of the Victorian era were especially prominent in the case? What was the influence of Charles Darwin’s emerging theories?
7. Summerscale observes an aspect that Whicher and Samuel Kent have in common: “Factory inspectors, like police inspectors, were agents of surveillance” (61). What is the significance of this similarity? Did Whicher and Kent seem aware of what their occupations have in common? Might Whicher have had a bias toward Kent? Why or why not?
8. What role did gender play in the case? How were the female suspects, Elizabeth Gough and Constance Kent, treated by the police, the press, and the public? How might the case have proceeded differently with a male primary suspect, such as Samuel Kent, William Kent, or a male servant?
9. “Whicher’s job was not just to find things out, but to put them in order. The real business of detection was the invention of a plot” (94). How does the chronology of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher parallel the order of detection? When does Summerscale deviate from chronological order, and why?
10. “The Road Hill case was dense with fabric” (70). How did the material evidence shape or unravel the case? How would a murder investigation today handle these bits of fabric?
11. Summerscale recounts, “In the early 1860s the emotions aroused by the Road Hill murder went underground, leaving the pages of the press to reappear, disguised and intensified, in the pages of fiction” (217). What was the relationship between fiction and nonfiction in the Road Hill case? Which genre came closer to the truth of the murder and its motives?
12. To the public, Constance’s confession was a sign that “God had triumphed where man—and science, and detection—had failed” (236). What role did religion play in the unraveling of the Road Hill murder case? Why might the public have credited religion over detection in the resolution of the case?
13. Summerscale points out Constance Kent’s own “impulse to detect,” dating from her childhood (296). What did Constance and Whicher have in common? Where did their “detection” methods differ? In the end, how was Constance an “imperfect detective” (299)? Could the same label also be applied to Whicher? Why or why not?
14. Summerscale identifies a pitfall of investigation: “The danger, in a real murder case, was that the detective might fail to solve the crime he had been sent to investigate. He might instead get lost in the tangle of the past, mired in the mess he had dug up” (75). In the end, which secrets of the Kent family seem irrelevant to the murder?
15. William Kent is a shadowy figure for much of the book, emerging as a distinct personality mostly in Part Three. Why is so little recounted of William in the beginning? What aspects of his personality emerge as most interesting—and most suspicious—in the final pages of the book? Is Whicher’s accomplice theory the most plausible? Why or why not?
16. Summerscale writes of Saville Kent in her afterword, “In unravelling the story of his murder, I had forgotten him” (303). Is this forgetting apparent in the book? Is this work of nonfiction “a tragedy with a happy ending,” as Raymond Chandler deemed the detective story (304)? Why or why not?
17. Which recent murder cases have caused as great a sensation as the murder at Road Hill of 1860? Why might murder prove so riveting in the press and in fiction, both in the Victorian era and today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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