The suspicions of Mr. Whicher : a shocking murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective
/ by Kate Summerscale
- 1st U.S. edition
- New York : Walker & Company , 2008.
- xxiii, 360 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. (some col.), maps ; 22 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
To see what we have got to see -- The horror and amazement -- Shall not God find this out? -- A man of mystery -- Every clue seems cut off -- Something in her dark cheek -- Shape-shifters -- All tight shut up -- I know you -- To look at a star by glances -- What games goes on -- Detective-fever -- A general putting of this and that together by the wrong end -- Women! Hold your tongues! -- Like a crave -- Better she be mad -- My love turned -- Surely our real detective liveth -- Fairy-lands of fact -- The music of the scythe on the lawn outside.
In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. 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, Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable--that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. 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. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.--From publisher description.
9780802715357
2008000247
Wicher, Jonathan
Detectives---England---London----Biography Murder---History---England---19th century