Review: 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher' by Kate Summerscale

TRUE CRIMEA | Real-life murder shapes the course of detective fiction

Much of the detective novel as we now know it began in 1860 when a little boy was suffocated, stabbed, nearly beheaded and dropped down a privy (we Americans would call it an outhouse).

Even today, the grisly murder of 3-year-old Saville Kent, which English author Kate Summerscale chronicles in the true-crime The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (Walker & Co., 384 pages, $24.95), would be shocking. But in mid-19th century England the slaying shattered the nation's sense of pastoral tranquility because it happened not in London's slums but in a country manor near Bath.

Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the first eight detectives commissioned by Scotland Yard, was dispatched from London to the Kent family estate, called Road Hill House. Whicher already was a celebrity, lauded by Charles Dickens in a series of magazine articles. With his arrival at Road Hill House, the case erupted into a national press sensation.

As Summerscale relays the fascinating history of the Road Hill murder, she examines how it shaped the course of detective fiction. Eight years later, Wilkie Collins would sanitize some of the case's particulars (he demotes a blood stain to a paint stain) and incorporate them into The Moonstone, considered the first British detective novel.

Even without Collins' embellishments, the Road Hill case reads like mystery fiction. Whicher discovers the home filled with suspects. Behind its middle-class veneer, the Kent family is divided by internal jealousies and rumors of adultery, insanity and incest. Nearly every occupant has dark secrets, but only one is the killer.

"This was the original country-house murder mystery," Summerscale writes, "a case in which the investigator had to find not a person but a person's hidden self."

Summerscale's writing is fast and clean, her research deep and persuasive. But like many detective novelists, she lingers too long past the climax. The final three chapters should have been condensed into two.

Borrowing a phrase from Collins, Summerscale describes the obsession with Whicher and the Road Hill murder as "detective-fever." Snoop around any bookstore or library today and you'll find evidence that the fever still rages, nearly 150 years later.

Jeffrey Westhoff

For the Sun-Times