This is a true crime story about the gruesome murder of a child in Victorian England. I guess his story will remain being told in "The Woman in White" and other mystery novels. It's not a "non fiction book that reads like fiction", like the above mentioned "Devil." Poor, poor Mr.
I think this suffers from misleading marketing. I applaud the research that went into this book, I just wish that at least half of that energy went into writing the book instead of just organizing the findings into chapters. This read like a dry, overly ambitious thesis paper. Too much time was spent quoting the novels that were influenced by this case and very little on presenting the actual story in a readable fashion. Actually, none of the characters came to life. And frankly, the guy on the page would have a hard time influencing anything. This was a man who influenced all the famous literary detectives from Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe. From the beginning we are promised a story about this interesting man and the case that brought him down. So disappointing! I was hoping for another "Devil in the White City" but, what I got was "Devil in the over researched, meandering, dull city." Poor 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. 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…from the cryptic Sgt. 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 dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.
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