The Suspicions of Mr. WhicherBy KATE SUMMERSCALE

Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers

The greatest case of the detective who inspired Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

 It could be called a perfect crime: not because the perpetrator escaped detection but because its particulars perfectly captured…key anxieties and preoccupations of its time and place. 

Sometime in the wee hours of June 29, 1860, in Road Hill House in Wiltshire, England, Saville Kent, a child of three, was taken from his cot beside his nursemaid’s bed and murdered. His body was discovered hours later in the servants’ outdoor privy. His throat had been slit and his chest bore a deep knife wound; there were cuts on his hands and signs of smothering. An open drawing-room window might have suggested that the culprit had entered from the grounds, but police investigation showed that to be physically impossible. It was clear, alas, that the murderer was one of the family members or servants who slept in the house that fatal night.

This murder lies at the center of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, and it could be called a perfect crime: not because the perpetrator escaped detection but because its particulars perfectly captured and intensified key anxieties and preoccupations of its time and place. Not only did it represent a violation of the Victorian tabernacle, the home, but as an inside job, it fed a lurking unease that the sacred haven of privacy was also an incubator of passion, a realm of secrecy and unwholesome deeds.