The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House (TV Tie-In Edition) - Softcover

Kate Summerscale

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408824523 ISBN 13: 9781408824528

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2011

Synopsis

Kate Summerscale re-opens the case of the gruesome Road Hill murder of 1860, but models her meticulously researched account on the country-house murder mystery - the genre inspired by the real murder and its investigation by Jonathan Whicher, one of Scotland Yard's very first detectives. 'The best whodunnit of the year - and it's all true' (Tatler). Slightly off-mint.

About this title

About the Author:

Kate Summerscale was born in 1965. She is the author of the bestselling The Queen of Whale Cay, which won a Somerset Maugham award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. She has also judged various literary competitions including the Booker Prize. She lives in London with her five-year-old son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher:

The Victorians made a romance of detection. In a newly uncertain world, a detective seemed to offer science, conviction, stories that could organise chaos. He turned brutal crimes—the vestiges of the beast in man—into intellectual puzzles. He was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest. Yet the Victorians also made a fetish of privacy, and many felt that the investigation at Road Hill amounted to a violation of the middle-class home. Mr Whicher exposed the corruptions within the household: sexual transgression, emotional cruelty, scheming servants, wayward children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing. The scene he uncovered aroused fear (and excitement) at the thought of what might be hiding behind the closed doors of other respectable houses. His conclusions helped to create an era of voyeurism and suspicion, in which the detective was a shadowy figure, a demon as well as a demigod.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1408824523
• ISBN 13: 9781408824528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 372