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The brutal murder in 1860 of a three-year-old boy in rural Wiltshire was a crime that created a countrywide frenzy in Britain at the time, and sparked an entirely new literary genre: the country house murder.
Almost 150 years later, the murder at Road Hill House looks set to regain a firm grip on the national imagination after a modern account of the Cluedo-style killing won the £30,000 ($78,000) Samuel Johnson prize. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder at Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale, had been deemed as the most commercial book on the six-strong shortlist.
The prize, regarded as the non-fiction "Booker" in the literary world, had been tipped to go to Patrick French's biography of the writer V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is. The murder of Saville Kent took five years to solve and inspired a generation of writers including Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.
The case had all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery: a body, a brilliant detective called Jack Whicher and a country house steeped in secrets. The murder took place at the height of summer in an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road. The home was owned by the Kent family, who were apparently asleep with the door firmly bolted, when the murder took place. They awoke to the murder which provoked national hysteria that a respectable, middle-class family could be held under suspicion for such a brutal crime.
Summerscale says she was drawn to it after reading about the murder by chance. "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 was a model for the fictional sleuths of today. His reports and notes have even been preserved by the Metropolitan Police." It had been "a treat to research", she admits.
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." The figure of Whicher is believed to have inspired the creation of Sergeant Cuff in Collins' The Moonstone and Dickens' all-knowing Inspector Bucket in Bleak House as well as Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Rosie Boycott, a former newspaper editor and chair of the prize's judging panel, says the winning book had been a un-animous choice. "It was very much like the [Madeleine] McCann case is today, with the media crawling all over it. No one wanted to believe an upper-class family could commit a murder like this one, so everyone wanted to blame the servants," she says.
- INDEPENDENT
