The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a shocking murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective by Kate Summerscale

Do you like a classical murder mystery set in an English country house? What’s more, do you prefer your murder to be set in the Victorian era, when in upper and middle class homes complex and rigid social conventions only too often bred secrets and perversions behind closed doors? If you do, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher should be just the thing for you; despite the fact that it is not a fictional tale at all, but a true story that took place in England in an upper class country home in Wiltshire in 1860.

Ms. Summerscale, a journalist and former literary editor, has written an enthralling true crime story that encompasses all the details that fans of true crime stories find essential: the crime, the suspects’ actions, the police investigations, blunders, and breakthroughs, and also the detailed proceedings of the various court hearings. At the same time, she has managed to pen a story that draws you in with its narrative style and does not get bogged down in the detail. The book is very well crafted and leads the reader on, not only through the details of the case, but also through Ms. Summerscale’s argument. She argues that this case was the real case that gave rise to the conventions and popularity of country house murder fiction continuing today. Many of the real details of the case appeared in fiction in the years that followed; for example, the case influenced tales like The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Mr. Whicher, one of the founding eight members of the Detective force at Scotland Yard, was the original popular heroic detective, and was interviewed and quoted by Charles Dickens. Like the fictional Cuff in The Moonstone, Whicher embodied for the public the archetype intuitive, intellectual detective, who caught criminals by using his powerful observation of people and clues. When Whicher’s long career was substantially ruined by this case in Wiltshire, there arose a further era of detective fiction where the detective is seen as either crass and inept, or as a dark influence, a lower-class intruder into the sanctity and secrets of the middle class home.

This book can be enjoyed on many levels. You can appreciate Ms. Summerscales’ scholarship in the infinite details of mid-Victorian English culture that she lays out for us, and in her deep knowledge of the crime fiction of the era and also of Scotland Yard and the judicial system. She writes perceptively of the people involved in the case, so that you soon begin to see that all the characters involved in the case are full of secrets. Ms. Summerscale compares this case to classical murder mysteries where everyone is a suspect with things to hide. The detective has to sift through all the secrets and see which suspect is hiding the fact that he or she is a murderer. In this case in Wiltshire, the person convicted may or may not have been the culprit. You will have to read the book to find out!