The birth of mystery/detective fiction?

[the_croupier]

 
Just came across a review of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, by Kate Summerscale. It sounds really good:

From the NYT review:

Kate Summerscale’s fastidious reconstruction and expansive analysis of the Road Hill murder case, which centered on an infamous crime that had all of England reeling in the summer of 1860...

Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the eight original officers of Scotland Yard’s detective force, honored among his colleagues as “the prince of detectives,” was sent down from London to this heavily industrialized region in the south of England to bring some professionalism to the local investigation. But this was no open-and-shut case — there was no obvious motive for the murder of a child, there were no witnesses at all, and critical clues were lost or compromised — and therein lies its real significance....

Once lodged in the collective imagination, the murder drew comment not only from the hyperventilating press and outraged guardians of public safety and morality, but from literary lights of the day. Dickens proposed his own theory to his friend Wilkie Collins, and both made pointed use of the case in later novels. (For the true lit-hist-myst buff, to reread “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” or “The Moonstone” directly after “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” is akin to having an epiphany.)

Comments

[gramarye1971]

I flipped through this book in a bookstore about a month ago, and found it rather engaging and interesting but somehow...off. It seemed to have a difficult time deciding what kind of book it wanted to be -- 'true crime' vs historical mystery fiction vs straight-up history book. It felt a bit speculative in parts, dwelling a little too closely on what the individuals involved in the crime might have felt or ought to have felt. I don't know if the publishers were trying to market it as closer to mystery than history, or were hoping to snag both target audiences, but I suspected a little editorial dabbling in Summerscale's work.

It's absolutely worth looking at, though. I'd like to know if anyone else shares my opinions, especially since I only made a very cursory reading of the book.

[the_croupier]

Ah, can't say I'm surprised. Very frequent problems with a book like this.

Still, if the content is there, I'll give it a try.