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.