The History and Mystery of a Victorian Crime

At the end of her story Kate Summerscale is jolted by being reminded that the juvenile victim, whose throat was slit and whose body was shoved down a privy, had once lived: “In unravelling the story of his murder I had forgotten him.” The purpose of all investigations, whether real or fictional, she concludes, is “to remove us from the presence of death”; perhaps they do, especially in light-hearted detective stories like Dorothy Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Yet a writer or a policeman can pay serious respect to death, as Summerscale does, by taking close account of how and why foul play was done.

This history of a horrific murder in an English country house (Road Hill) in 1860 is much more than that. It is also a story about the origins of the modern police department and its special branch of detectives, as well as a linking of these events with their literary offspring in the popular form of the detective story as written by Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and M. E. Braddon.

Kate Summerscale organizes her richly documented story of the murder with a novelist’s feeling for suspense and drama. She is in a way a detective herself, working on the case as the detective Jonathan Whicher did. When she speculates, she does so not as a novelist but instead as he might have done. All her characters and events are documented and are never invented. Her unraveling of the case with its many turns leaves some uncertainties because an inconclusive ending is appropriate to reality’s complex contingent events, just as closure is appropriate to the fictional form.

Whicher incarnates both the positive image of the detective and, when he appears to fail, the negative image of the prying destroyer of privacy, who takes the roof off the country house to expose its hidden corruption and evil. (As Summerscale points out in one of her many interesting asides, to detect derives from the French verb to unroof.) There was even a mystery about Whicher himself because there is no official record of the deaths of his wife and son.

The subtitle refers to the “undoing of a great detective,” and Punch caricatured him as “Inspector Watcher of the ‘Defective Police.’” Yet in his unpopular theory of the crime he rightly predicted that only a confession by a particular stepchild would reveal what really happened, and later he cogently argued that the perpetrator must have had an accomplice. Whicher was also abused for his work in one of the most famous court battles of the nineteenth century, involving the claimant to the Tichborne estates; yet Whicher in the end exposed him as an impostor.

Whicher was a gardener’s son, and Sergeant Cuff in Collins’s The Moonstone derived from the same background. Cuff began his life in his father’s rose garden, and he hoped to end it trying his hand at growing roses. Whicher, when he retired, lived out Cuff’s plan; and Collins in his novel drew on many other elements of the Road Hill murder. Summerscale recognizes that Collins’s policeman figures in the birth of “a new kind of book.” His full-length detective story appeared in 1868, nineteen years before Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet.

Detective stories are closely connected to true-crime studies because, as Summerscale points out, “the real business of detection was the invention of a plot.” It has its own dangers because the detective “might get lost in the tangle of the past, mired in the mess he had dug up.” So Whicher’s problem is also hers because tracking the details and the possible suspects can be overwhelming for the detective, the historian, and the reader: “Everyone seems guilty because everyone has something to hide.” For most of them, however, the secret is not murder, and “this is the trick on which detective fiction turns.” Like...