The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Subtitle: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
Publisher: Walker & Company; Distributed to the trade by Macmillan
Published: April 15, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780802715357
Subjects: Europe - Great Britain - General; Murder - General; Mystery & Detective Fiction; History / Expeditions & Discoveries; Expeditions & Discoveries; General; History; True Crime / Espionage; History: World
Description: 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 England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land, Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard. 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 Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade.--From publisher description.