Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

With blurbs like "Gripping, unputdownable" I expected more from this book.

I found it putdownable in both senses of the word. It was obtuse, disorganized, and unsatisfying.

The introduction set me up for a thrilling read. Then Summerscale dissertationed the heck out of it, heading off on trivial tangents, spending pages saying virtually nothing, and never giving the reader the satisfaction of insight.

Summerscale describes the investigation into the crime as "...like a torch swung round onto sudden movements, into corners and up stairwells." And, indeed, her book was the same, though she let her flashlight rest on minutiae far more than necessary, perhaps in an attempt to create content where there was no content.

Some interesting trivia about the development of the idea of a "detective" and fiction devoted to the craft, though. The word "clue" derives from "clew" which means "ball of thread." The word had come to mean "that which points the way" do the the myth of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur. The word "detect" comes from the Latin de-tegere which means "unroof." Summerscale says "the original figure of the detective was the lame devil Asmodeus, 'the prince of demons,' who took the roofs off houses to spy on the lives inside." The term "red herring" was not invented until 1884 and derives from something that puts bloodhounds off a scent.

And this, from an 1853 editorial in the London Times was moving to me;
"Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity . . . make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. in strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"

But otherwise? Skip it.


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