I've been waiting since summer for my name to reach the top of the library hold list for "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective," but it finally happened.
I picked up my copy of the book and could not put it down; all that waiting and I devoured it in a weekend. So there's no question but I will add my voice to the chorus of praise (and a hefty prize) for author Kate Summerscale. For my tastes, "Mr. Whicher" combines the best of both worlds: densely documented non-fiction and a 19th century country house murder.
But in this case, it's a real murder and we follow the trail of the most famous member of a new law-enforcement entity: the detective. The story centers on the abduction and murder of the three-year-old son of a supposedly respectable middle-class couple. The child was stabbed, his throat was cut and he was then stuffed down the privy. The house was locked, everyone was at home asleep and it seems clear that a member of the immediate household must have committed the crime.
And what a delicious household: the governess who married the master after the first wife went insane and died, the children of the first and second marriages competing for attention and affection, and the usual list of indoor and outdoor staff required to take care of a country estate. If there is anything that may deter a reader, it's the daunting list of all these characters printed on the first pages.
What makes the book so fascinating is that both the sensational crime and the famed Detective Inspector Whicher (one of the original eight Scotland Yard detectives) become the model for crime novels and crime solvers, beginning with Wilkie Collins and "The Moonstone." We see the public mania for amateur sleuthing take hold; widespread fascination with the charismatic detective, from Dickens on down; the pandering and speculation by much of the press about the crime. It all reads like something that happened last week.
That modernity is one of the things that is so compelling about the book. That and the detail that Summerscale unearths about the murder, the people and the period. It is a tour de force accomplisment with Summerscale writing a page-turning crime novel while she dissects the history of the page-turning crime novel. To pull it off, she includes an almost overwhelming amount of detail which will either fascinate you or bore you. I was hooked, and so I even read most of the notes and sources at the end of the book.
D.I. Whicher had a good idea about who committed the crime but public opinion turned on him before he brought the investigation to a satisfactory conclusion. Citizens didn't like the idea of someone of a different (meaning lower) class invading the sanctity of their homes and holding them accountable; asking personal questions that were considered prying, if not outright prurient.
Summerscale takes the tale to its conclusion, but it is the unfolding history — not the identity of the murderer — that held me spellbound.
Here are a few of my favorite tidbits of information from "Mr. Whicher":
The modern word "clue" stems from "clew," a ball of thread or yarn, which had come to mean "that which points the way" because Theseus used a ball of yarn to find his way out of the Minotaur's Labyrinth.
1862: word "clueless' first used.
Summerscale lists a number of nicknames as well as derogatory terms for the police, noting that "pigs" has been a term of abuse since the sixteen century.
