Kate Summerscale - The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House

Belvedere Jehosophat - Tuesday, 23 March 2010 - Print Version

In the early hours of the 30th June 1860 a small child was taken out of his cot unnoticed by his little sister and the household nursemaid that shared the room. He was found the next morning in an outside privy where he had been stabbed and where his throat had been slit so severely that his head was almost detached from his body. The doors and windows of the house had been locked from the inside suggesting that the killer was either one of the help or a family member.
On the 15th July 1860 Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher made his way to Road Hill House, directed there by Scotland Yard to solve this heinous crime.

The book describes itself as being modeled on the country-home murder mystery, but The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is much more than a murder story; it is a cultural history.
Whicher was one of the eight Scotland Yard officers that made up the initial detective force – a force that came into existence in 1942, one year after the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. It is a book that chronicles not just the murder, but detective as cultural phenomenon.

In the mid-nineteenth century the detective was a sensation – Charles Dickens, with his finger firmly on the pulse of the nation, raved about them, and detective-fever was in the air. This was reflected not just in the letters written to Scotland Yard by amateur sleuths who thought they could contribute to the ongoing investigation but also in the explosion of detective fiction of the time. The murder at Road Hill House would itself influence a new generation of crime writers.

It was, however, an infatuation that was not to last. First and foremost in English sensibilities, and in particular middle-class sensibilities, was the perception of the home as a space that was private and inviolable. The murder at Road Hill House would offer a double blow to this notion: it not only demonstrated that unseemly, sinister events could take place behind these facades of middle-class respectability, it also showed that these spaces could be invaded during the course of an investigation. This invasion, in fact, was for some a crime more heinous than the murder itself, especially as, adding insult to injury, detectives were often sourced from the working classes.

What makes The Suspicions of Mr Whicher so interesting, indeed so tangible, is the immediacy of the sources and the depth of the research. This was a case that captured the British imagination – the investigation was vast and well documented. Sources include government and police files, books written about the crime, pamphlets, essays, newspaper articles, even maps, railway timetables and police memoirs, etc. The dialogue, moreover, was taken from testimony given in court. The cast of characters contains over fifty major and minor participants, and it is a story that winds its way to a leper colony in Australia.
Summerscale has done a terrific job of holding together such a sprawling book, one that could have easily become a meandering mess. Furthermore, the writing is so tight and the research so well prepared, that the book not only succeeds in its stated goal of being a country-house murder mystery, it becomes one of those rare books that is so fun to read that you forget that you are being taught something.

As a last note, the final mystery of the book is also perhaps the most interesting. Soon after the murder and the investigation, a photographer was engaged to prepare a stereoscopic card of the Road Hill House. A stereoscopic card contains two photographs which when viewed through a stereoscope offered a single three-dimensional image. The card could be prepared by taking a photograph with a double-lens camera or by taking two single photographs with a slight shifting of the camera between each shot. In between the first photograph of this particular stereoscopic card and the second, two people, two men, move into the shot in one of the windows of the house. This card and the image of those two people was discovered in 2009 and forwarded onto the author to be included in the second edition of the book. It’s a delicious little mystery, the spirit of which encapsulates an excellent book.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher