The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House
By Kate Summerscale, Bloomsbury, Rs 650

Kate Summerscale’s book has won the Samuel Johnson Prize for 2008. Deservedly so. It is close to being a masterpiece as a piece of research that is written up as a detective story.

The ingredients are all that of a classic country house murder mystery. On a summer’s night in the remote village of Road in Wiltshire, a child of the Kent family, who live at Road Hill House, is found murdered. The book tells the story of the murder and its detection. But nothing here is fiction. Everything is painstakingly culled from archival records about a murder case that became the subject of national hysteria.

The year is 1860. Summerscale tells us that even in fiction the detective was a new figure. Auguste Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, made his debut in 1841, in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. The detective force of Scotland Yard was formed the next year, and Jack Whicher, who was sent up from London to investigate the Road Hill murder, was the doyen of that force. Whicher was the inspiration for Sergeant Cuff, the detective in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, considered by T.S. Eliot as the first and the best of all English detective novels. The Road Hill murder mystery left its traces on Charles Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and perhaps even on Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw.

These facts are important since they provide the essential components for Summerscale’s narrative. She tells the story of the murder, its detection and the public outrage both provoked, but she weaves in insights that she draws from the detective fiction of the time, from comments that Dickens made about Whicher himself and even from the methods and theories of Sigmund Freud. The book is as much about the emergence of the art of detection as about the telling of a rather grisly murder that cried out for an immediate solution but found none. Whicher had suspicions, but they did not get confirmed till five years later, by which time Whicher had retired from the force. The denouement of the case was not without some surprise.

Apart from Summerscale’s masterly crafting of the narrative through which she holds together many strands, there is also the research she has undertaken. She has delved into the Public Record Office and the local records; she has added to these the reports that appeared in the media; and lit these up with telling comments from the literature, especially from the new genre of detective thrillers, of the time. The result is fascinating.

She also asks of her readers to reflect on the popular art of detective fiction. “A storybook detective,” she says, “starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”