The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Summerscales's detailed accounting of the murder and disposition of a small child by a member of an "up and coming family" in Victorian England is hard to beat if you like grotesque crime details and intricately recounted distasteful, tabloid-like blended-family relations. The "Mr. Whicher" of the title was a brilliant detective whose correct solution to the murder was not vindicated for many years, ironically through a confession by the actual murderer. However, given the ostensible facts, the author vastly overstates the case by including "the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective" in her title. That Mr. Whicher was extremely frustrated and upset by failure to bring the guilty party to book at the time and later through a trial is undeniable. But this reader did not find that he was "undone," if by that is meant public ostracization and similar forms of opprobrium. However, this book is hard to put down. In the end, the least interesting fact may be the identity of the actual killer. This murder mystery proved to be an enduring headline grabber in the English press for many years.

When I was young I used to read many mystery novels, and a lot of them originated in England. Invariably the murder was soved by the detective getting everyone together and revealing how the murder was done, and "who done it". It seemed that these were the only type of British mysteries being written, and I often wondered how this particular niche of the genre got started. This extremely well-written book has finally answered that question, and also tells an exciting true murder story. We get the origination of the detective in England, and also the origin of some of the words we see all the time in mysteries, such as "clue" or "sleuth". The detective has the facts of the murder, but couldn't prove it, and it destroyed his career in law enforcement. The solution only came several years later, and did not involve any police force. Even when the tale is almost done, the writer leaves us with the feeling that there was at least one other participant in the murder who was never brought to justice. Often life does not imitate art! This is an exciting book, and I highly recommend it.

Not only is the murder itself a fascinating puzzle but the author weaves into it the history of Victorian detective fiction and the ways in which reality and fiction interacted to create the figure of the modern 'detective'. Ms. Summerscale seems to have read everything and marshals all her scholarship in very readable form.

We always think of detectives and crime-solving as things that have gone on for centuries. In actual fact, Edgar Alan Poe invented the detective story in 1841, and the next year the British set up their first detective police to solve crimes where the criminal wasn't immediately apparent. For much of the 19th century these individuals were essentially making it up as they went along, and dealing with a variety of public prejudices (bobbies originally had to wear their uniforms all the time, to avoid corruption and the possibility of them sneaking up on someone) and strange practices to invent, as they went along, the craft of crime-solving. In 1860, 18 years after the detective department was founded (they had offices in a square in downtown London known as Scotland Yard, hence the name) a young boy was killed in rural England. His throat was cut rather viciously, and he was thrown into a privy. The house in which he lived with his family was very large, and since the doors were locked, it seemed inevitable that the killer must be either a family member or a servant. After two weeks of inexpert investigation, which solved nothing, the local police petitioned London to send a Scotland Yard detective. The one they got was one of four Detective Inspectors, Jack Whicher, who according to the author was one of the original detectives who essentially invented his craft. His assistant, "Dolly" Williamson, went on to be superintendent of Scotland Yard during the `70s and `80s. Whicher settled pretty quickly on who he believed was the culprit, but he was unable to obtain a confession and had scant physical evidence. He made an arrest, but the family closed ranks, and ultimately there was no immediate conclusion to the killing. This destroyed Whicher's career. He wound up retiring from the police a few years later, and worked intermittently as a private detective in later years. Eventually he was vindicated, and the case wrapped up, but he was never reinstated. I enjoyed this book immensely. So much of what the author recounts found its way into detective novels of later years that it's amusing, to say the least. The characters are interesting, and so are their fates. I enjoyed this book immensely, and would recommend it to anyone interested in true crime.

This is a wonderfully done true crime story of a murder in England in 1860. If that were all, we'd have an eminently enjoyable book. But this is also a social commentary and a history of the early detective story: you'll learn how and when the words "clueless" and "sleuth" entered the language, for example. You have a horrible murder of a 3-year-old boy in a manor house in the country. The outside doors, windows, and gates are all locked--and also, unusual for us nowadays, many of the interior doors were locked as well--preventing access to the larder, cellar, drawing-room, etc. So suspicion perforce falls upon the family and servants. This is before the days of forensic science--so it isn't even clear whether the child was killed by stabbing, throat-cutting, suffocation, or drowning. The local constabulary in this west England area are inadequate to the task in what very quickly becomes a sensationalist case, and so a detective from London is called in to investigate. Detectives are new, only a couple of decades old, as are detective stories. Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher is Scotland Yard's best investigator (at the time, there weren't all that many). The child's family is not very well liked in the area, and the family itself has many unsavory secrets--including insanity. Summerscale relates Whicher's detective work and his growing fixation upon a 16-year-old sister. But what makes all of this particularly enjoyable is how Summerscale relates the sensationalism in the press, the plethora of theories as to the murder, the coming-forth of outsiders to confess, the initial belief in Whicher's abilities (followed by growing disbelief). There are wonderful descriptions of the detective novels of the time--including ones with female detectives--the public appetite for these stories, and the additions to the language (you'll see where clue/clew comes from). The child's nanny slept in the room with the child, who was taken during the night. Charles Dickens was one of the numerous people who put forth the theory that the child had discovered his father in bed with the nanny and had been killed to prevent him telling Mama. Actual solutions, however, were not readily forthcoming. Whicher fell out of favor in the public eye--but he did pop up again in the other sensational case of the era--the Tichborne Claimant. (Hopefully, Summerscale will turn her prodigious talents to that case next). So what you get here is a fascinating view of the early days of detectivedom (if that's a word), the detective in fact and fiction, and the public's taste in literature. The book reads like a good detective novel, with well-portrayed characters: there are arrests, trials, maps, drawings, and photographs. A great book indeed!