THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, by Kate Summerscale: I’d been looking forward to reading this for a while after seeing glowing reviews in Entertainment Weekly and elsewhere. The story of a scandalous nineteenth-century crime interwoven with a history of detection, including early detective fiction? Sign me up. But the book was unsatisfying, and even, I’m afraid, a little tedious. I’m not sure if the concept was faulty or if it would have worked better in the hands of a different writer, but compelling storytelling and insights were in short supply. There were too many disparate strands (the murder case, the biography of Jonathan Whicher, the history of detection, the literary references) that never came together, which just made it feel like there was a lot of dry, unnecessary padding obscuring the stuff you wanted to know about (what happened and why?). In particular, it bugged me how the literary references were often used out of context—although there was some interesting discussion of how the famous case was fictionalized in books such as The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret, through the rest of the book quotes from earlier proto-mystery novels were just thrown in as though they were supporting factual evidence of what the actual people involved in the case might have been thinking or feeling (I’ve returned the book to the library, so unfortunately I can’t give any examples). I would have been pretty fascinated to read an article along the same lines, but there just wasn’t enough substance to sustain me through an entire book. The best thing I can say about it was that with its many mentions of Bleak House, it finally inspired me to get off my butt and read that massive tome, which I am quite happily enjoying at present.