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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

The Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

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The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Written by: Kate Summerscale
Narrated by: Simon Vance
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About this listen

 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 of England and led to a national obsession with detection - ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land.

At 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 that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

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 Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it author Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.

©2008 Kate Summerscale (P)2008 HighBridge Company. Great Britain Literature & Fiction True Crime World England Detective Fiction

What the critics say

"Not just a dark, vicious true-crime story; it is the story of the birth of forensic science, founded on the new and disturbing idea that innocent, insignificant domestic details can reveal unspeakable horrors to those who know how to read them." ( Time)
"A bang-up sleuthing adventure." ( Kirkus Reviews)

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Profile Image for sandra white

One of my favourites

This was one of my favourite books to listen to. I was skeptical of listening to a book, and The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher was the first one I chose to listen to and I can honestly say I was hooked from the second Simon Vance began to read; his voice was captivating and drew me into the world of Mr. Whicher. It is also a book I was listen to again.

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Profile Image for Norman

What's all this, then?

This is a typical True Crime book, with the added benefit that it happened 160 years ago, and all the principals are dead. It is notable that it was "tried" in the press, in an eerie echo of what is happening in social media today. People don't change.

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