The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

By Kate Summerscale

Review: Janet Johnstone

 

 

In June 1860 a murder rendered the Victorians enthraled with the case and introduced the one of the first private detectives in British history.

 

The Kents were a well-to-do middle class family living in an elegant Georgian home, Road Hill House, near Trowbridge.  After a quiet night they woke in the morning to find that the youngest son of the household was missing, soon to be discovered gruesomely murdered.  The doors and windows had all been bolted during the night leading to the horrific conclusion that the murderer had to be one of them.

 

Detective Jack Whicher arrived two weeks later. As one of the earliest detectives of Scotland Yard, he was a pioneer in taking a more scientific approach to crime solving.  His patient work over a long period exposed a household which was not so healthy as it might appear from the outside, filled with scheming servants, wayward children, emotional cruelty, sexual transgression, insanity, jealousy and loneliness.  These discoveries were greeting by the Victorian public with both fear and titillation.

 

Much detail about the interior of the house was recorded by the police and magistrates, not only the floor plan but also details of footprints, nightclothes and the habits of all those who lived there, both family and servants.

 

The public was riveted by the details of the murder and the family.  Hundreds took it upon themselves to act as detectives and wrote to newspapers and to Scotland Yard giving their solutions.  

 

The case influenced the fiction of the day as well as the crime thrillers read today.  The first detective in fiction was in Poe’s The Murders in the rue Morgue in 1841.  The Road Hill House murder sparked the imagination of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and picked up also by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

This book, however, deals with real life events, so it does not read as easily or as sharply as fiction, so it is necessary to pick it up with a different set of expectations.  There are omissions which one would not expect in good fiction, but that comes down to the fact that certain details are simply not known now or then.  But it provides great insight behind the closed doors of a Victorian family and to the growth of detective work.

 

John le Carré called it a classic of the finest documentary writing.  It won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award.