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.
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