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.
Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. The Haunting of Alma Fielding was short-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. The Wicked Boy won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable-that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Whicher, a number one bestseller in the UK, has been translated into more than a dozen languages and won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction and the British Book Awards Book of the Year. 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 New York Times bestselling account of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. Whicher had a quite remarkable reception by the non-fiction readers due to the particular narrative quality and agility with.
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