The murderer was in the house

One morning in 1860, a three-year-old child went missing. His name was Saville Kent, and he was the youngest son of a prosperous family, living in a gracious English country home called Road Hill. By the time the morning was over, his body had been found, brutally murdered and thrust down the hole of an outhouse. The case was bungled by local policemen, and two weeks later a Scotland Yard detective was called in. The detective was Jack Whicher, and his investigation into the murder of Saville Kent exposed rottenness and madness in the bosom of this conventional English family.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is not a mystery novel, though you could be forgiven for thinking it sounds like one. The development of English mystery fiction - the country house with its prescribed number of suspects, the detective who comes in from outside to uncover its secrets - developed as a direct result of the public's fascination with the Road Hill case. The author, Kate Summerscale, argues that such seminal suspense novels as The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James were all directly influenced by the Road Hill murder.

I thought that this book was a bit padded. The author did a lot of research, and she seemed determined to include it all, whether it advanced her story or not. In spite of this, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a very interesting read, a good bet for both true crime junkies and connoisseurs of classic mystery fiction.