Victorian Murder Investigations, Public Attitudes, and the Birth of Detective Fiction
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If you are fascinated by the hypocrisy of the Victorians, you'll love this book. If you want to read a great murder mystery, you should probably search out a work of fiction instead.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher has a wide charter: Tell the story of the murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in his English country home, describe the police investigations, relate the public reaction to the murder and investigations, detail what happened to the characters, help us understand our psychological need to read detective fiction, and provide new insight into the seeds of the crime.
Although the book claims to give us a fiction-like description of the murder and its investigation, Ms. Summerscale's writing isn't quite in the style: She's clearly a non-fiction writer. She's also not very careful of the facts: There's a glaring example in her "A Note on Money" that precedes the Prologue. In the first paragraph she tells us a pound is worth $130 today and in the second paragraph she tells us that a hundred pounds is worth $120,000 today (Yes, she made two mistakes!).
For my taste the book could have been edited down quite a bit. There was about 150 pages worth of material I was interested in within 300 pages of text. She presumes that I want to know more about Victorian authors of detective fiction than I do, and I could have used a much shorter version of what happened next to everyone.
I thought that the two most interesting parts of the book were how modern the analytical methods were that Whicher used (opportunity, motive, and a search for missing clothing) and the commentary on how much we want our detectives to be supermen who always find the criminal (making us feel more secure while allowing us to be moved by the passion behind crime) rather than thinking about the victim.
As for the speculation about the possible seeds of the crime, I thought that the medical parts of that were pretty speculative. The other parts seem more plausible and should have been exposed earlier in the book.
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