The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale
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Uploaded by BloomsburyPublishing on Apr 30, 2008
http://www.mrwhicher.com
Kate Summerscale talks about her bestseller, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a pacy analysis of a true British murder case from 1860, the unravelling of which involved one of the earliest Scotland Yard Detectives and inspired novelists such as Dickens and Wilkie Collins
It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks.
The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects.
The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes -- scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing -- arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment.
A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery -- a body; a detective; a country house steeped in secrets. In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.
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I enjoyed the book but I still think she did it!
rees276 10 months ago
This is a cracking book! Initially, the wealth of characters was hard to keep track of but it settles down and then the story unravels in a tantalisingly logical way.
Robutube1 2 years ago
An absolutely fantastic book, with huge scope covering social history, the origin of detectives, and, as Kate Summerscale says, fascinating characters. I loved it!
deloit 2 years ago