Download The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: The Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective AudioBook Free
In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at underneath of a patio privy along with his throat slit. The offense horrified all Britain and led to a national obsession with diagnosis, ironically destroying, in the process, the job of perhaps the biggest detective in the land.At that time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there have been only eight detectives in all of Britain and hardly ever were they called out of London, but this offense was so shocking that Scotland Backyard dispatched its best man to research, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly presumed the unbelievable-that someone within the family was accountable for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient facts or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a busted man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the true legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the hard, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today: from the cryptic Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collinss The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammetts Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads just like a Victorian thriller, and in it author Kate Summerscale has fashioned an excellent, multilayered narrative that is really as cleverly created as it is attractively written.
