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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780802715357 |
Powells.com Staff Pick
At once a mystery and a history of early mystery novels, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a page-turner. Summerscale picks apart a famous Victorian murder, the murder that sparked "detective fever" and inspired Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to create some of the first fictional detectives.
Recommended by Beth, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
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.
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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Karl L Stenger, April 12, 2008 (view all comments by Karl L Stenger)
This page-turner proves that real life can be more suspenseful and gripping than fiction. Centering around one of the most infamous murders of the Victorian era, the book traces the career of Jonathan Whicher, one of the first and best known detectives in England. When three-year-old Saville Kent is viciously murdered, Detective-Inspector Whicher is dispatched by Scotland Yard to investigate. When his investigation, which concentrates on the boy's family and their servants, fails to procure a conviction, his promising career is derailed. The book not only turns readers into armchair detectives, it also provides a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of Victorian propriety and shows the effect the case had on the development of the detective in the novels of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780802715357
- Subtitle:
- A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Walker & Company
- Subject:
- Expeditions & Discoveries
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- HIS051000
- Subject:
- Murder - General
- Subject:
- Europe - Great Britain - General
- Subject:
- Mystery & Detective Fiction
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- Murder
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Edition Number:
- 1st
- Publication Date:
- April 15, 2008
- Binding:
- HC
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 384
- Dimensions:
- 8.56x5.92x1.26 in. 1.27 lbs.
