This historical book about the Road Hill House murder has just won the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, a prize that is much deserved. This story unfolds like a thriller with the characters developing as the story goes on, and a number of theories being pieced together in both the book and the reader's mind, rather as happened in the 1860s when this was such a sensational case.
The murder is a terrible one and be warned, the description of it is quite upsetting. The family, which consists of a father, four children from his first marriage, and his second wife and children, live in Road Hill House. One morning the small boy from the second marriage is not in his bed, the drawing room window is slightly open but other than that there is little sign of forced entry; the child's nanny slept in the same room as the child but had not woken. Eventually his little body was found stuffed in the outside servants' latrine, his throat cut.
This crime is terrible but the story that unfolds after becomes more and more horrific, as police bungles, press intrusion, public hysteria about the case and villification of the family, and eventually, my favourite part of the book, a farcical inquest held by a barely sober magistrate some years after the event seemingly just because he wanted to, all build up to make you wonder how any member of this family kept their sanity.
The Mr Whicher of the title was a Scotland Yard detective who was called in to solve the case, but not until the local police had been investigating for a week. The local police's tack appeared to be to assume that the family could not possibly have anything to do with it and should be protected as much as possible, allowing potentially valuable evidence to be lost and causing great bad feeling when Mr Whicher began suspecting everyone who could potentially have been involved.
The skill of the writer is that although the process of the investigation and the social commentary on the hysteria are the real meat of this book, a need to know the resolution is also present throughout, just like a whodunnit. There is an answer - the murderer is uncovered (obviously I won't say who!) but not before everyone involved in this, from the nanny, to the family, to the detective himself has had their life torn apart by the case and its notoriety.
The public attitude to the case was an aspect I found particularly interesting. Everyone had a theory about who did it, people went to the area to sight-see where the murder occurred and crackpots even wrote to the police claiming to have solved the murder (despite being several hundred miles from the scene of the crime). The hysteria and interest the case excited would be almost unbelievable if we had not experienced a case which excited similar hysteria and interest in this country in the past couple of years where a child disappeared from a middle class family.
The investigation shows that this, at least, is an area where we have progressed over the past 150 years though, and this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. This was a point when the detective force had only just been created and the role of the detective was a new one, viewed with suspicion in a number of quarters. Whicher was villified by the press and treated as an outsider snooping where he did not belong, tainting an honest family with his vile suspicions. The haphazard way in which the local police investigated before Whicher was called in was quite shocking.
It is this new role of detective that caught a lot of people's imaginations too, and Summerscale illustrates a number of sections of the book with quotations from contemporary sensation literature such as Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, or Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, to show where they were directly influenced by the case. Dickens was also deeply interested and wrote profiles of the Scotland Yard detectives. It is this aspect of the book, the far-reaching impact that it had on English literature, which adds another dimension of interest to the book.
