The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Rose Hill House, by Kate Summerscale

William Leith5 April 2012

Within this excellent true crime story, Kate Summerscale takes us back to the England of 1860. Queen Victoria has been on the throne for 23 years. Prince Albert is still alive but only just. Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament are under construction.

Victoria station is just being finished off. The young Scotland Yard is run by Sir Richard Mayne; his detective division is less than two decades old.

Mayne's favourite detective, and possibly the best on the force, is a stocky man in his forties with a tragic past and a pockmarked face.

This man's name is Jack Whicher.

On a July day in 1860, Whicher boarded a train at the brand-new Paddington station. He was hoping to solve a murder case in the West Country. But this wasn't just any murder case — this was the murder at Road Hill House, the most notorious murder for years, a killing that captured the imagination of the whole country, including writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Dickens actually met Whicher, and wrote to Collins about the case. Summerscale has come up with a terrific coup here. In the early days of detectives, here was the case that might very well have cemented the concept of the detective, and the detective story, in the national imagination.

A little boy was killed in a country house in Wiltshire. The killer, it seemed, was almost certainly one of the servants or a member of the family. But things are by no means simple, because more than one person in the house has something to hide. Here, at the heart of the prosperous Victorian family, is a dark pit of secrets.

Who was the killer? Would the master of the household, Samuel Kent, have killed his own son? If not, why did he lock the police in a room when they arrived? Might the boy have caught him in bed with one of his servants? After all, he had done this sort of thing before — he was currently married to a former servant.

And what about the children from his first marriage, two of whom were also living in the house? Did they feel uneasy about their status in his new family? Were they jealous of the little boy? Deftly and expertly, Summerscale takes us through Mr Whicher's detection process. Meanwhile, she makes us think about what the world was like in 1860. Police work, of course, was quite different — no DNA and no fingerprints — so the confidence of the detective was paramount. As Summerscale puts it, "a chain of evidence was constructed, not unearthed".

Whicher makes his decision, and a suspect is arrested. But that's not the end of the matter, not by a long chalk.

This is a book that will stay with you — and it will be a gift to a film-maker.

Summerscale takes us into the world of the early detectives — a world in which social climbing, with its endless veils of deceit, is rife. She brings real cases to life — the murders and robberies Whicher solved before he took on the Road Hill case.

Here was a society of newfound wealth, with a growing bourgeoisie who wanted to protect that wealth.

It's no wonder, as the crime historian Julian Symons has pointed out, that detectives were becoming a new type of folk hero.

But there's more. With some very deft research, Summerscale has herself become a detective, and brought the case up to date superbly.

When he arrived at Road Hill House, Mr Whicher had his suspicions. You will have your suspicions, too, and they might change as the pennies, beautifully arranged along the way, begin to drop into place. This is excellent detective work, applied to a great detective..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
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.The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing - arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment. A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery - a body; a detective; and, a country house steeped in secrets. In "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher", Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

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