The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Kate Summerscale |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | or The Murder at Road Hill House |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Honors | |
| It is a summer’s night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects. In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life. | |
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.
Reviews
Barnes and Noble
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 nursemaids 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.
This murder lies at the center of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, and it could be called a perfect crime: not because the perpetrator escaped detection but because its particulars perfectly captured and intensified key anxieties and preoccupations of its time and place. Not only did it represent a violation of the Victorian tabernacle, the home, but as an inside job, it fed a lurking unease that the sacred haven of privacy was also an incubator of passion, a realm of secrecy and unwholesome deeds. “Perhaps,” Summerscale writes, summarizing this feeling, “privacy was a source of sin, the condition that enabled the sweet domestic scene to rot from its core.”
Was something rotten at Road Hill? Possibly. The head of the family, Samuel Kent, was on his second wife, the familys former governess, who, it was suggested, had usurped the first Mrs. Kent before the death of that lady, who was said to be mad. Had Samuel transferred his affections yet again, this time to his young sons nursemaid? Had the illicit couple been “intriguing,” as Charles Dickens put it, in her bed in the nursery that night? Dickens was fascinated by the case—all over it like Inspector Bucket—and set out his views in a letter to Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White was being serialized as events unfolded at Road Hill House: “Poor little child wakes in Crib, and sits up, contemplating blissful proceedings. Nursemaid strangles him then and there. Mr. Kent gashes body to mystify discoverers, and disposes of same.”
One person who did not buy this scenario was Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, sent from London a couple of weeks after the murder. To be sure, he too found domestic arrangements in Road Hill House worth pondering. Kents four children by his first marriage clearly ranked lower than the three of his second, and there was evidence of resentment. Whichers prime suspect, one of the less-favored children, had a history of daring, disruptive behavior and possible madness. Though you will not learn who Whicher fingered from me, Summerscale does not, in fact, make much of a secret of it. She follows Whichers investigation, and, thanks to his doggedness and acumen, he knows—and we know—halfway through the book who is the villain.
Not that this knowledge did the ace sleuth much good—quite the reverse. Before Whicher had arrived on the scene, the local police had thoroughly bungled the case, in great part out of class deference. They had searched both the persons and belongings of the servants but did not subject the Kent family members to similar unpleasantness. Whicher, however, did not recognize such distinctions when it came to ferreting out the truth. His snooping—which extended deep into the familys dirty laundry—bore fruit and inspired one newspaper to pronounce that the “whole moral interior of the house ought to be laid bare to the public gaze.” But Whichers investigations also outraged public sensibilities, fuelling the horror that a mere functionary could go fossicking through a respectable familys most private effects. The feeling of desecration carried into the arraignment hearing, the defense depicting Whicher, in Summerscales words, as “vulgar, greedy, rapacious” and “a clumsy, lower-class despoiler of a virginal innocent.” The suspect was freed and Whichers career was badly damaged. He was denounced in Parliament, and lived in bitterness for almost five years. Then he was thoroughly vindicated, in a manner I shall leave you to discover.
Summerscale says she has modeled her book on “the country-house mystery.” Certainly, the story she tells is absorbing in its attention to character, material detail, and the relation between the several players. She adds her own deductions, going beyond the final verdict to show that the guilty party most likely did not act alone and to suggest who was the probable accomplice. She also puts forward a most unsavory hypothesis at books end that is satisfyingly, if shockingly, plausible. What is more, she provides floor plans, so essential to the country-house mystery, as well as a family tree, list of characters, little maps, sketches, and wonderful photographs to pore over.
Still, the book is something less than a mystery—and more. Summerscales real focus is cultural and psychological. She shows how the murder, its domestic context, and the process of detection matched both a darkening mood in the country concerning the family and a general distaste for and fascination with criminal investigation. She would also like to show that the Road Hill case not only “inspired ‘detective fever’ throughout England” but actually “set the course of detective fiction” and “helped shape the fiction of the 1860s and beyond, most obviously Wilkie Collinss The Moonstone.” This will not convince those who have actually read that great novel—to say nothing of Dickenss Bleak House (serialized 1852-53) or Collinss earlier stories in which horrid family secrets and detectives abound. And perhaps it wont convince those who havent either, for even as Summerscale lays out her arguments for the decisive influence of the Road Hill House case on the direction of fiction, she provides more than sufficient evidence to disprove the notion. It is clear by her own account that public fascination with the case and the appearance of The Moonstonewere simply two aspects of the same mid-Victorian temper. Be that as it may, both as a story and an analysis of a historical mood, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a thumping good read. —Katherine A. Powers
