The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale > Reviews (12)

Winner of the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize, this is a true story of a murder mystery that gripped this Country in 1860 and for many years afterwards.

At midnight on the 30th June 1860, 3 year old Saville Kent is gruesomely murdered and the family realise that he was murdered by someone in their household - the house is always bolted from the inside at night and therefore only the family and the live in servants could be on the suspect list.

Jack Whicher is assigned to solve the case and throughout the book he begins to unravel the lives of the Kents, the motives the back-stories and the gossip surrounding the family.

Who could have murdered a young innocent boy? Do they find the culprit?

My Thoughts ===

Seduced by some glowing reports and the fact that the story is based on true facts, I bought this book to enjoy a good murder mystery. However, it is not as it appears, and this is largely my fault for not realising the type of book it is supposed to be!

The book is broken up in to several sections; firstly we are given a family tree, list of characters and floor plan of Road Hill House where the murder was committed as well as some other bits and pieces. Helpful enough - the Kents lived in a large house and were fairly well off so had many staff and this was a great reference throughout the first half of the book where you have to keep checking who is who.

The next sections are some extremely matter of fact chapters about the events leading up to and after the murder. In fact, this is when I realised that this wasn't quite going to be the book I thought it would be. There is very little dialogue, the facts are stated and the characters whereabouts listed as well as general observations and then the author moves on. It reads very much like a textbook or just a record of events, for example:

"At 7 pm the three gardeners and Emily Doel, the assistant nursemaid, left Road Hill House for their own homes. Holcombe locked the garden door from the outside as he went, and returned to his cottage across the lane. Samuel Kent locked the garden gate once all the live-out servants had gone. Twelve people were left in the house for the night."

It goes on like this, sometimes giving more details about the characters like what the children were doing that evening, how old someone was and any injuries they had etc but no other details.

In fact, most of the book goes on in this vein, making observations about the events as well as giving general commentary and information about Victorian life.
The trouble was, I just couldn't engage with it as much as I would have liked. If I had picked it up and flicked through to sample the style of writing, I probably wouldn't have gone any further in reading this book. However, I found I had to read on and find out more about the facts. I got about half way through the book before my dad told me he had read it and that I wouldn't find the answers I was looking for. A disappointment for sure, but I felt that I needed to see what conclusions were drawn.

The most disconcerting aspects of this book are the lack of personalities, the cold hard facts are great but I felt it lacked something to make it really compelling reading. There are lots of details about, for example, what Charles Dickens thought of it all at the time and what the newspapers wrote as well as extracts from letters from the general public giving their views. There are even pictures of the household members and Mr Whicher in some sections as well as photographs of the house. These all added an interesting aspect to the book, but it still wasn't quite enough to draw me in.

There is no doubt that this is a well researched, thorough and interesting book of a case that gripped a whole nation and also highlights a time when people were fascinated with detective work. The conclusions of Mr Whicher are fascinating and really quite clever at times and actually I quite liked the fairly open ending of the murder case (I wont ruin it any more than that) but I did find myself skipping large sections of the book where it was mere rambling about what newspaper reported what etc. There are some interesting sections about other cases that were about at the time that was meant to have some bearing on the conclusions of the Road Hill House Murder.

I'm not sure If I would recommend this to anyone looking for an "old fashioned" murder mystery but saying that I can see how the author Kate Summerscale did an excellent job on a case that is still a mystery in ways today. The lack of characterisation and style of writing was off-putting but I'm not sure how else she would have done the story and her research justice; another author might take this case and work it into a story probably weaving a bit more fiction in to it - after reading Summerscales succinct version of the facts I can see that this really wouldn't work.

If you are looking for an interesting and thorough look at a murder case from Victorian society, than this is it. It has accurate facts about the case and findings, lots of historical pieces about Victorian society: their attitudes and way of life as well as providing some intrigue and mystery about a very gruesome murder indeed.