What’s BookieMonster currently reading? The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or the Murder at the Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

 

Phew. That’s rather a long title.

Description: 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. Inspector Jonathan Whicher’s real legacy, however, lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, all-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 reads like the best of Victorian thrillers, and has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize in London.

BookieMonster says: An enjoyable piece of non-fiction mystery, accompanied by some social and cultural history. Summerscale does an excellent job at conveying a sense of underlying secrets and subtle menace in her descriptions of the Kent family and their Road Hill House, and accurately captures the history of “the detective” both as a real and fictional character.

My attention did wander on occasions, however that is probably more a reflection on my lack of great enthusiasm for mystery stories than on the writing itself, which was uniformally good.

For those following BookieMonster’s small spoiler problem, yes I spoiled this one too!

I would definitely recommend this title and highly recommend it to mystery fans, particularly those interested in Victorian mystery.