false 1747896 18 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&#8212;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&#8230;from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins&#8217;s <i>The Moonstone </i>to Dashiell Hammett&#8217;s Sam Spade. <i>The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher</i> 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. 3254095 book 15 4 2008 The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective total:1166|5:135|4:423|3:400|2:164|1:44| 1166 3939 2197 389 2 4 false false Fri Oct 17 11:41:48 -0700 2008 Fri Oct 17 11:56:24 -0700 2008 more...]]> 1 3 false false Thu May 08 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat May 03 15:25:43 -0700 2008 Fri May 09 11:07:38 -0700 2008
YET, it was much less riveting than my beloved Death at the Priory. It was impossible not to compare the two Victorian murders and Death a...more...]]> 2 9 false false Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Jun 17 08:34:21 -0700 2009 Thu Jun 25 07:38:25 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 3 false false Tue Jan 20 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 20 11:31:04 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 20 11:38:23 -0800 2009 more...]]> 5 4 false false Sat May 17 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 13 18:34:17 -0700 2008 Sun Aug 17 07:25:55 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 3 false false Sun May 18 23:09:46 -0700 2008 Wed May 14 16:28:59 -0700 2008 Sun May 18 23:09:46 -0700 2008 The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale is an account of a real Victorian murder mystery investigated by Jack Whicher, one of the first nine Scotland Yard detectives. In an upper middle class country home, a terrible murder occurred. Three-year-old Saville Kent was discovered dead in a pr...more...]]> 5 3 false false Sat Dec 20 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 27 11:00:44 -0800 2008 Sat Dec 27 11:00:44 -0800 2008 If you like detective novels...
If you are interested in the development of the novel...
If you have any interest in the development of the science of forensics...
If you like true crime...
If you enjoy good factual writing...
...more...]]> 3 5 false false Mon Sep 21 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Sep 21 01:16:23 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 23 12:20:36 -0700 2009 more...]]> 3 1 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 13 15:16:42 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 13 15:23:57 -0700 2008 more...]]> 2 5 false false Wed Aug 20 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat Aug 09 10:57:59 -0700 2008 Wed Aug 20 16:42:32 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 4 false false Wed Dec 10 15:52:06 -0800 2008 Sat Apr 11 14:17:23 -0700 2009 more...]]> 2 1 false false Fri Feb 27 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Sun Sep 28 05:03:54 -0700 2008 Fri Feb 27 14:46:46 -0800 2009
I didn't pay for 200 pages of what read like some friggin mediocre senior honors thesis. I don't care about how the murder turned ...more...]]> 4 2 false false Wed Apr 29 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 02 19:18:47 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 28 18:34:26 -0700 2009
Summerscale does a really good job of pacing the book just like your typical mystery book might be paced. And the fact that nothing cont...more...]]> 3 1 false false Sun May 24 06:39:24 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 02 04:55:11 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 1 false false Tue Mar 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Wed Mar 04 10:41:50 -0800 2009 Wed Mar 04 10:52:07 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 1 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 09 10:21:39 -0800 2009 Mon Feb 09 10:39:06 -0800 2009 Nowadays when every other new television show is some detective/crime drama, we take the genre for granted. "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher," is both a mystery/crime novel and an academic history book. It relates the story of a Victorian manor house murder (before it was a genre), and...more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue Feb 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 03 03:34:50 -0800 2009 Tue Feb 03 03:56:08 -0800 2009
I was looking forward to reading, what I thought was, a true crime book with a bit of a look into Mr. Whicher's professional life too. What I got instead was ...more...]]> 4 0 false false Mon Dec 15 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 16 14:39:22 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 16 14:39:22 -0800 2008 The Moonstone, and discovered that significant details and plotlines were inspired by the gruesome 1860 murder of three-year old Saville Kent. In writing The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Summerscale obviously did voluminous research in pieci...more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Nov 23 14:29:36 -0800 2008 Sun Nov 23 14:32:47 -0800 2008 more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Sep 08 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Sep 11 12:12:23 -0700 2009 Fri Sep 11 12:13:08 -0700 2009 http://passionatebooklover.wordpress.com...

In the year of 1860, three-year-old Saville Kent was found brutally murdered in the outdoor privy of his family’s country estate. Scotland Yard Detective-Inspector Jonathan Jack Whicher was called in to lead the investigation. He was one of Eng...more...]]>