"The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher"

One of the best things about retirement is more time to read, probably my favorite activity. I think in the past six months I have probably read more books than in the prior five years. One genre that I have returned to is the mystery story something that I read in large quantity in the 1970’s. I had read all of the Sherlock Holmes canon before I finished high school, but I think what really got me started was the Masterpiece Theater presentation of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, “Clouds of Witness.” That introduction to Dorothy Sayers led me into all of her works and then on to countless others, but for whatever reason my interests turned in other directions and it is only in recent months that I have gotten back into this field.

This past week I finished Kate Summerscale’s new book, “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective.” This is actually a true story and I read very little real crime stories, but what attracted me was the period, Victorian England, and the way that the book was tied into the beginning of the English murder mystery as a genre. Offsetting this attraction was the fact that this was the horrible story of the murder of a three year old boy that had to been committed by a member of the household.

The book is well researched and Ms. Summerscale made very good use of the archival sources as well as contemporary newspapers. I am very familiar with the value of the latter source of historical information. She also does a good job of telling how the detective from Scotland Yard solves the case only to have his solution rejected and his reputation tarnished. That’s not the end of the story, but I don’t want to go too far and give away endings. The author does a good job of outlining how Mr. Whicher from Scotland Yard became the basis for famous literary detectives like Dicken’s Inspector Bucket and Wilkie Collins’ Sgt. Duff. She does make the unfortunate mistake of saying that Sherlock Holmes was always right – see “The Yellow Face.”

What really struck me, however, was something the author said in her Afterward. She rightly, I think, points out how the efforts to solve the crime tend to obscure the person of the victim – an innocent three-year old boy. But she then goes on to suggest that the purpose of the detective investigations both fictional and real is to turn the tragedy into a puzzle with the solution of the puzzle making the horror and grief go away.

Speaking for myself and speaking only about fiction, I certainly don’t read it to see the hero make tragedy and horror go away or avoided. First of all, I read mystery stories to match wits with author to try to solve the puzzle myself – I still remember with pride figuring out the ending of the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” before I was even in high school (the only one I ever figured out). Later as an adult I had a similar experience with Dorothy Sayers, “Five Red Herrings.”

There is also then the matter of justice and in this case I mean justice as Shakespeare means it – “seasoned with mercy.” The detective is the agent who represents not to make something go away, but to insure that people don’t literally get away with murder. In some cases, and there are multiple examples in Sayers and Doyle, the detective solves the crime only to allow the guilty party to avoid the literal punishment of the law. In one Sherlock Holmes story of which I forget the name, Holmes literally conducts the trial in his room, using Watson as the model of the rational English juryman.
Finally I read detective fiction for the characters, the location and the time period. Which means that most of what I read takes place in England with the Victorian era as well as the 1920’s and 30’s the favorite time periods. Having written this, I appreciate Ms. Summerscale’s book even more because it made me think about mysteries and why I read them. I would recommend it to anyone who likes mysteries, especially English mysteries.