Kate Summerscale





Kate Summerscale

Author profile


born
in London, The United Kingdom
January 01, 1965

gender
female

website

genre


About this author

Kate Summerscale (born in 1965) is an English writer and journalist.
She won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction in 2008 with The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House and won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1998 (and was shortlisted for the 1997 Whitbread Awards for biography) for the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, about Joe Carstairs, 'fastest woman on water'.
As a journalist, she worked for The Independent and The Daily Telegraph and her articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph. She stumbled on the story for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher in an 1890s anthology of unsolved crime stories and became so fascinated that she left her post as literary editor of The Daily Telegra...more


Average rating: 3.34 · 8,799 ratings · 1,500 reviews · 3 distinct works · Similar authors
The Suspicions of Mr. Which...
3.38 of 5 stars 3.38 avg rating — 7,282 ratings — published 2008 — 38 editions
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: T...
3.09 of 5 stars 3.09 avg rating — 1,350 ratings — published 2012 — 23 editions
The Queen of Whale Cay: The...
by
3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 avg rating — 175 ratings — published 1998 — 11 editions

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“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"

(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853)”
Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

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