Kate Summerscale is the former literary editor for the Daily Telegraph and author of THE QUEEN OF WHALE CAY, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award.

Her new book, THE SUSPICIONS OF MR. WHICHER, which is published in March, is an account of the brutal murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in June 1860, a crime that so horrified England’s chattering classes, that Scotland Yard sent its best man, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, to investigate, inadvertently sparking an enduring national obsession with detection.

Kate Summerscale lives in London, England and we corresponded by the electrical wonder of the internet.

How did you first come across the story of Jonathan Whicher?

I read about the Road Hill child-murder in an old anthology of celebrated Victorian cases. I was fascinated by the story - a country-house murder in which everyone in the household fell under suspicion—but I was especially struck by the figure of Inspector Whicher, a brilliant detective whose career was ruined by the case. Whicher figured only as a secondary character in accounts of the crime, and I wondered what would happen if he were put at the heart of the narrative. By minutely reconstructing his investigation, I thought I could write a true-crime book that was structured like a mystery novel. As well as revisiting the murder itself, the book might throw light on the earliest days of detection and detective fiction. The Road Hill case, after all, was the original country-house mystery and Whicher was one of the first eight detectives in the English-speaking world, a model for the fictional sleuths of today.

Was it difficult to research the book?

It was a treat to research! I spent months in libraries, reading old newspapers and pamphlets. There was plenty to look at, since the case was a huge sensation in its day. The Victorian public seemed to have been as intrigued as I was by the dark secrets of the murder victim’s household: the wayward adolescent children, the nervous nursemaid, the spinster sisters, the bad-tempered father and his two wives—the first a madwoman, the second his former servant and lover.

I read Whicher’s notes and reports on the case, which had been preserved by the Metropolitan Police. I visited the village in which the crime took place, and the owner of the former Road Hill House let me look around the building and grounds. I spent time in the surrounding towns and countryside. I read Victorian novels that dealt with crime and mystery. I read books on insanity, wool factories, governesses, infanticide, police procedure, syphilis. The more difficult part was researching Jack Whicher’s life. The most interesting facts I gathered about his private life were hard-earned, the fruit of long hours in archives and records offices. His professional life was much easier to unearth. Thanks to digital archives, I was able to find accounts of dozens of cases on which he had worked, and from these I tried to deduce what kind of a man he had been.

How much did you know about the period before you started?

I had studied some Victorian fiction as part of my English Literature degree, but I had not done any historical research.

Your previous book, The Queen of Whale Cay, was about the fascinatingly eccentric Marion “Joe” Carstairs, heiress to the Standard Oil fortune. Do you think Whicher and Carstairs have anything in common, or are you simply interested in their stories?

In each case, I was drawn to a story that felt as rich and suggestive as certain kinds of fiction. Both Carstairs and Whicher seemed to offer fresh ways of thinking about the times in which they lived. But their characters were utterly different. Joe Carstairs was forthright, bold, theatrical, a woman of action; Jack Whicher was ingenious, private, cryptic, a man of mystery. There’s an important difference between the books, too - The Suspicions of Mr Whicher isn’t primarily the story of a life, but the story of a murder investigation.

How did Jonathan Whicher inspire the fictional Victorian detectives we’ve come to know so well?

He directly inspired the wry, enigmatic Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, often cited as the first detective novel. Charles Dickens wrote about Whicher in magazine articles, and the early detectives were the models for the all-knowing Inspector Bucket in Bleak House.
The successor to these first fictional sleuths was Arthur Conan Doyle’s immensely popular private investigator, Sherlock Holmes. Like Whicher, Holmes is cerebral and inventive - but, unlike Whicher, he is a gentleman and an amateur, and he is always right. Whicher was a working-class London copper, with a pockmarked face and a taste for brandy, and he sometimes made mistakes. His true inheritors are flawed, haunted figures such as Philip Marlowe, Inspector Morse and DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect.

Have you ever been tempted to write your own detective novel?

I enjoy detective novels, films and television shows, but for me it was more interesting to write a book that tried to trace the origins of these stories in life, and to do so in a way that recreated some of the pleasures of detective fiction: mystery, suspense, the unravelling of riddles and clues.

Let’s get this clear from the start, we love Ray Fenwick!

Ray is an artist, designer, illustrator and “typographic thing-maker” living in Halifax, NS. He’s designed stuff for The New York Times, CMT, Nickolodeon, Urban Outfitters and others, and his work is very very cool. He also has a new book coming out in April called HALL OF BEST KNOWLEDGE.

According to his publisher Fantagraphics, “HALL OF BEST KNOWLEDGE is part graphic novel, part art object, part satire, part puzzle.” AND it looks gorgeous.

If you want to see for yourself, Fantagraphics have made a great 12 page preview available to download which includes the beautiful covers and endpapers.

Click here for PDF preview and then take a look at Ray’s website.

AND you should also go and take a look at the recently redesigned Fantagraphics website. It’s very spiffy.

Have I mentioned that we love Ray Fenwick?

In part two of our Q & A, Justin Cartwright, author of THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG, discusses his writing process and his reading habits! 

What motivates you to write?

I find that I have to write, and that it is only by writing that I really know what I think and feel.

When you first started your writing career, did you have a mentor or was there an author you particularly admired?

I have admired John Updike since I was 20 or so, but there are many others.

Is there a particular ritual which you adhere to when you’re writing a novel?

Yes, I go to the London Library, a private library, and write longhand in lined exercise books.

How much of yourself goes into you to work?

A lot. Sometimes my work is faintly autobiographical, but always it is written - and there is no other way - from within my own sensibility.

What are you working on now?

A novel about a family.

How do you relax when you’re not writing?

Play tennis, read, have as many holidays as I can manage and fish for trout.

What books are you reading at the moment and what made you pick them up?
Rachel Seiffert, the Dark Room; I met and liked her.

What was the last book you started reading, but couldn’t finish?

Couldn’t divlulge. Never inflict gratuitous hurt on writers

Could you introduce an author you think people should read, and suggest a good book to start with?

WG Sebald, Austerlitz, one of the most astonishing novels by one of the most original novelists of our time.

Click here for Part One

It’s taken us a little while, but we finally have all of Spring 2008 catalogues available as downloads from our website!

As part of our effort to make Raincoast greener, we’re trying to send out fewer catalogues this year, so if you are a web-savvy book reviewer or book buyer, please do download the catalogues or browse online - it’ll save a few trees!

Of course, if you would prefer actual catalogues in your hands (and believe me - we know there are many good reasons to want a bound catalogue) then do let us know and we’ll get one out in the mail to you ASAP.

Book stores, you can just let your reps know you would like a catalogue. Reviewers, you can email us at (and by all means send your review copy requests to that email address too).

Enjoy! 

Click here for the Spring 2008 Catalogues

Justin Cartwright is the award-winning author of In Every Face I Meet, Leading the Cheers, White Lightning, and The Promise of Happiness.

His latest novel THE SONG BEFORE IT SUNG is based on the lives of Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin.

Described by the LA Times as “a quiet masterpiece”, it traces the friendship between charismatic Axel von Gottberg, an aristocratic German, and Elya Mendel, a socially awkward but brilliant Jewish scholar, in 1930’s Oxford.

Sixty years after meeting von Trott, Mendel asks a former student, Conrad Senior, to unravel his collection of letters and papers.

Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa but, since graduating from Oxford University, has lived all his adult life in London.

We met in Toronto in October 2007 during The International Festival of Authors and later corresponded by email. 

What was the inspiration for The Song Before it is Sung?

It was seeing the showtrial of Adam von Trott and others in the Imperial War Museum, London

You’re perhaps best known for chronicling the foibles of contemporary society in your novels. Was it a challenge to write a story drawing on historical fact?

It was. The difficulty is in making judgements about what aspects of the story could be treated fictionally, and which had to be faithful to some underlying truths.

How did you start researching the book?

By watching the film and then meeting families of the resisters in Germany and the UK.

The Bodleian Library in Oxford provided the originals of letters from Von Trott to Berlin.

Conrad Senior, the researcher in The Song Before it is Sung, is often overwhelmed by his work. Did you ever feel the same way?

Yes. Knowing where to stop is the problem

Does the film of the executions actually exist?

Not as far as anyone knows, although it was made.

Oxford, which is one of the settings in the novel, is close to your heart and I understand you’ve written a book about the city called THIS SECRET GARDEN: Oxford Revisited. Why is it such a special place?

For me, fresh from South Africa in the sixties, it was as if I was visiting a place and a landscape of another but parallel life.  The mythology of Oxford was, and is, very powerful.

Both Mendel and Von Gottberg as immigrants to England seem to aspire to some kind of ‘Englishness’ - a somewhat elusive quality - which (correct if I am wrong!) is something of a recurring them in your work. Where does your interest in what it means to be ‘English’ come from?

The English had an enormous talent for mythologizing their past and their character. Although it is out of fashion, it still has a hold well beyond the confines of one small island.

Another recurring theme, it occurs to me, is that your protagonists often seem to be struggling to find their place in the world. Could you talk about that little?

I think consciousness and the sense of self in a vast universe is the subject of my novels, although not too overtly.

The fictional friendship between Mendel and Von Gottberg is fascinating. It’s full of incongruities and contrasts, and yet the two men share a strange affinity. How closely does it mirror the actual friendship between Berlin and Von Trott? 

In some aspects it’s very close. They were friends, but probably not nearly as close as I have made them in the book. That said, I think it is true that Berlin was in some ways an intellectual hero to Trott.

Do you think Von Trott was a hero?

Yes.

Could you explain the origin of the title, The Song Before it is Sung?

It’s from a saying of Alexander Herzen, which Isaiah Berlin loved: Where is the song before it is sung? To which Berlin replied, it does not exist. It exists only in the singing or the writing. And by this he meant it was like a life, which exists only in the living of it.

Part two of this Q & A will be posted tomorrow.