Editorial Review:

The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

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.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Sense and Prejudice:

If you enjoyed Daniel Stashower's "The Beautiful Cigar Girl," or either of Erik Larson's books, "The Devil in the White City" or "Thunderstruck," you should find "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" good reading. Like those other books, the author treats the story of a true crime like a prism through which to peer deeply into the society that the crime mirrors and transforms. In this case, Victorian England is under the microscope, when the sanctity of family privacy is pitted against an explosion in... more info

Thoroughly researched True Crime:

I have to say this is one of the more interesting true crime stories I have read. Ms. Summerscale has done an impeccable job researching the Saville Kent murder mystery, as well as the evolution of detecting, detective novels, and the effects it all had on Victorian England.
The story is a sad one: Saville Kent, the young son (I believe he was 3) of a middle class family was murdered in 1860 in England. It appeared as though the murderer was an internal habitant of Road Hill House where the family and... more info

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher:

This is a well written book. I was surprised to find myself propelled forward throughout as it is a combination of the details of an historical event and yet is a mystery. I thought that the writer captured the life of the people and the beliefs of the time very well.
This is a good read

An Elegant Overview:

Using a sensational murder case as a magnifying glass, the author elegantly explores links between literature and society. The subtitle ought however, to be the making of the great detective genre. The case was certainly unthinkable: one summer night i 1860 a small boy is lifted from his bed, his throat slit, and his body dumped in the servants' privy. All the evidence suggests the murderer is a member of the household. The Kent family was what we would call blended, children of two marriages living w/ the... more info

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