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For an account of one of the most controversial murders of the 19th century, Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder at Road Hill House has itself become a sensation since it was released in Britain last May. After riding high in the best-seller charts,
the former newspaper literary editor last week won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.
"It's been fantastic," Summerscale, 42, says when I meet her at her London home on the eve of the award ceremony. "I've got much more attention and coverage than I could ever have imagined. I left work to write the book so I went from being in a quite social environment, a newspaper office, to working by myself at home and in the library for a couple of years. So to emerge from that into a public world again where the book is seen and read by other people is very exciting."
Summerscale, whose 1997 debut The Queen of Whale Cay told the tale of renowned female powerboat racer Joe Carstairs, has been keeping some exclusive company. "The non-fiction best-seller charts are overwhelmingly dominated by memoirs by celebrities such as Jordan and Cherie Blair, and cookbooks by the likes of Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver," she laughs. "You wouldn't imagine a social history book would be up amongst that lot."
According to Samuel Johnson Prize judge Rosie Boycott, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Allen & Unwin $35) "is a rare work of non-fiction that mimics the suspense genre and leaves one gripped until the last paragraph". Something Summerscale achieves by utilising the conventions of crime fiction.
"I read novels for pleasure and I love researching non-fiction so if I was to write a history book that I'd want to read then it would have to have some of that flavour," she says. "The form the book takes arose quite naturally because what I was partly interested in with the case was the influence it had on detective fiction. It seemed quite fitting to tell it like a detective story as I'd be exploring first-hand what detective stories do with their tricks and devices and their structures."
The brutal murder of 3-year-old Saville Kent at his home, Road Hill House in rural Wiltshire, in June 1860 left many loose ends and dominated the headlines of Britain's then fledgling popular press. However, it has since faded into obscurity, something that Summerscale attributes to another infamous Victorian murderer. "Jack the Ripper has eclipsed all other 19th-century crimes," she says. Unlike Patricia Cornwell, who famously destroyed a painting by Walter Sickert in a forlorn attempt to prove that the artist was indeed Jack the Ripper, Summerscale doesn't jump to any conclusions.
"I didn't set out to solve the case or to come up with any definitive answers but sometimes with those kinds of stories you can't help but do that," she says. "People want to know whodunnit. You get caught up in that just as the newspapers of the time did. For my own sake and the readers, I didn't want to leave it open, I wanted to feel that I kind of knew but it's never definitive because it's too long ago and all we can have are strong suspicions rather than certainties."
After the local police made no headway, Inspector Jack Whicher was sent from London to lead the inquiry. Then one of London's most celebrated police detectives, Whicher was the model for Sergeant Cuff from Wilkie Collins' classic Woman in White and the Road Hill House murder also inspired elements of Charles Dickens' unfinished last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
"Dickens and Collins were fascinated by detection and detective work," says Summerscale. "Dickens by detectives themselves. He wrote about them, met them and befriended them. They saw detectives as some kind of mirror to what they were doing, which was writing fiction about contemporary society, uncovering secrets and dealing with some quite sensational material."
Comparisons have been drawn between Saville Kent's death and the much-publicised disappearance last year of Madeleine McCann.
"I'd more or less finished the book when she went missing but it wasn't published yet," says Summerscale. "The way it was reported on and the public ownership of the case was very similar. People coming up with their own ideas, and journalists and members of the public feeling that they had all the available evidence with which to do that.
"But there are other things as well. Such as the way the Portuguese police were ridiculed, which is like the way the Wiltshire police were derided. Scotland Yard had to send their man to sort them out, just as the British police were sent to Portugal. There were lots of parallels to the way the narrative takes shape and the story the press told."
