The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

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

The best summary of a detective work as penned by the writer ‘The real business of a detective is the invention of a plot'. Indeed Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher dreamed up a plot which turned out to be closest to the truth when everyone had alternative theories on the Murder of Francis Sauville Kent. When everyone thought otherwise, the inventive detective saw through all the puzzle set by the shoestring evidence to pin the murder to the cold sister Constance Sauville.

A rollercoster ride in the life of middle class Victorians English people obsessed with murder. One may be mistaken to think is the work of fiction from Charles Dicken's pen but this was an actual murder with a real detective - the first of their kind when the Scotland Yard was formed.

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!)

As a mystery story, this book is wonderful. As an introduction to the origins of the modern detective, this book could be better. The setting in the beginning of the book is vivid, setting the reader right in the town and house where the murder occurred. The major players in the story are also well defined, though since this is history and not fiction, there are few pretenses and red herrings. The book is full of side stories about background on characters and detective fiction, most of which I could have done without.

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.

Wonderful. Could be classified as “true fiction” but was also a fantastic history of the Victorian household, of detective fiction, and the modern detective - or rather how these intersect.

I'd forgotten how good this is. The unfolding of the story and the use of contemporary detective stories is well done.