The mid-19th century was not a tender time in Britain. Ghastly crimes were committed, and not exclusively in slums. A child’s murder was reported almost daily somewhere in the country.
The child murder at the center of this excellent account is probably the most notorious. Three-year-old Saville Kent was found dead June 30, 1860, his throat slashed, his chest punctured with a knife. He was stuffed down the outdoor privy of his well-to-do family’s large house near the village of Road in Wiltshire.
Several things set this murder apart, Kate Summerscale says in “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher.” It set off a nationwide fascination with police detective work. It inspired a thirst for detective fiction and shaped the form the fiction took.
“This was the original country-house murder mystery,” Summerscale writes, “a case in which the investigator had to find not a person but a person’s hidden self.”
Not least of all, it provided the real-life model for the prototypical fictional detective: Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’ “The Moonstone” (1868), widely regarded as the first English detective novel, who begat a long line of emulators.
The model for Cuff was Inspector Jonathan “Jack” Whicher, one of eight original Scotland Yard detectives. He had joined London’s Metropolitan Police as a constable in 1837, eight years after it was established as the first such force in the country.
Whicher was considered the doyen of that small detective band because of his skill in solving all sorts of crimes, including two earlier murders of young boys. The case of Saville Kent, however, would prove his undoing.
The art and science of crime detection was hardly well advanced in 1860, particularly among the inexpert county police, who had blundered about for two weeks before Whicher was called in. They suspected Elizabeth Gough, Saville’s 22-year-old nursemaid, as the murderer.
So did others, including Charles Dickens, who steeped himself in this case and in detection in general. The motive was that Saville had caught Gough in flagrante delicto with a lover — presumably Saville’s 59-year-old father, Samuel Kent.
Strong reasoning lay behind this. Kent, after all, was on his second wife, who happened to be the now 40-year-old former nursemaid (and presumed mistress) from his previous household. Kent, father of eight children from both marriages, apparently had not only a strong libido but also a penchant for lechery with decades-younger nursemaids.
But Whicher leaned toward Saville’s half-sister Constance, 16, as the murderer. The motive here was jealousy and resentment over the undoubted favoritism that Kent showed toward his second wife’s children.
The nearly universal immediate assumption was that certainly someone in the household, rather than an outsider, did it. The coroner’s jury thought so, and suspected a hush-up on the part of influential people.
Villagers reviled the Kent family. Rumors that had circulated during Kent’s first marriage concerning a deranged first wife and an affair were revived. A fresh rumor arose that Kent’s son Edward was the actual father of Saville, his supposed half-brother.
For the times, Whicher’s investigations were meticulous. He arrested Constance. There were hearings. Later, Gough was arrested. But it came to nothing. By early 1861, inquiries had petered out inconclusively.
Then, gradually, popular attitudes turned around. The murder itself shook belief in the security of the home, especially when mutterings about the husband/father were seen and heard in the press and the public.
People began to see investigations as a violation of the sanctity of the middle-class home, an assault on privacy. Editorials harrumphed about the Englishman’s home being his castle.
For similar reasons, the public also saw plainclothes detectives — as distinct from the stout-hearted, uniformed constable — as intrusive spies and violators of privacy and liberties. Whicher was denounced in Parliament, then in the press.
His career was badly affected. He investigated just one more murder (also unsuccessfully) before retiring in 1864 at age 49 and becoming a private investigator.
The structure of “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” is itself modeled on the country-house murder mystery. Summerscale, author previously of “The Queen of Whale Cay,” takes an appropriately prosaic, chronological, just-the-facts- ma’am approach.
Plenty of period and location detail helps put us in the scene. Information about how the police were recruited, lived and worked is especially fascinating.
This being a mystery, it would not be cricket to tell you the solution. Though legally conclusive, it has come into question. The author goes on to tell the fates, often curious, of the many principals — and why syphilis may have played a central role in the whole affair.
Roger K. Miller is the author of the novel “Invisible Hero” and writes the blog .
Nonfiction
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, by Kate Summerscale, $24.95
