The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

The national bestseller, now in paperback. In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. Inspector Jonathan Whicher's real legacy, however, lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, all-knowing and all-seeing detective that we know and love today, from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins'sThe Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher reads like the best of Victorian thrillers, and has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize in London.

Kate Summerscale is the former literary editor for the Daily Telegraph and author of The Queen of Whale Cay, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Whitbread biography award. She lives in London.