Most of the detective history was interesting, but I have to admit that there were parts where my mind wandered a bit, as well. The best part of the book is the murder case, itself, for sure. This book not only looks at that particular case, but also tells us a bit of history of detectives and detecting. Whicher was one of the first detectives at Scotland Yard and was assigned the case at Road Hill House. It was the mid-1800s when detectives were first employed. It appeared that it must have been someone already inside the house who did it. Read moreģ.75 starsIn 1860, in a country house in England, a little boy was taken from his bedroom and murdered in the night. 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.

Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. 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.

Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable-that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. 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.Īt 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.

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The New York Times bestselling account of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

The suspicions of mr whicher book