Kate Summerscale / Features / Untitled Books

'At a time of enormous spiritual crisis, there was great value invested in the detective, a sort of displacement of religious faith.'

Kate Summerscale

Kate Summerscale, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction, talks to Katie McCalmont about her fascinating new book, the shadowy detective who inspired the likes of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, and a child murder that haunted a nation.

'I was struck when I was writing about Whicher by how much similarity there was between him and the police detectives now.'

Kate Summerscale does not watch daytime TV. She tells me this in the kitchen of her leafy Hampstead flat, as if I may be under the impression that she might. This is the woman who wrote her biography of Joe Carstairs, The Queen of Whale Cay, around a full-time job as the Literary Editor at the Daily Telegraph; the woman who won the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award and who was nominated for the Whitbread biography award in spite of the fact that '[Carstairs]wasn't an important person, she wasn't someone anyone had ever heard of'; and the woman who has been awarded the Samuel Johnson prize for her new book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. She is softly spoken, thoughtful, intelligent and unpretentious. She has won two prizes for two books. This doesn't sound like someone who watches reruns of 'Quincy' on a Monday afternoon.

Ironically, like the detective of her second book, Kate found the inspiration for The Queen of Whale Cay through her work as an obituary writer. A letter landed on her desk at the Telegraph reporting the death of a 93 year-old woman called Joe Carstairs. She began to do some research, looking into newspaper cuttings and talking to people who'd known her. She uncovered the story of a fascinating woman: a cross-dressing lesbian and a motorboat racing champion, who ruled an island in the Bahamas like a despot. As she would feel later about the Whicher case, Summerscale couldn't believe that this was a true story, 'it seemed stranger and more fantastical than fiction', or that no-one had really heard about it. Not only that, but she could use Carstairs' life to 'look at every decade and see all the sort of social movements of the century, but in a completely fresh way because you were seeing them through this bizarre and slightly magical view'

It was just one such historical period, the mid-Victorian era, which became the starting point for her second book. She wanted to find a way to write about the domestic sphere of the nineteenth century, the family and the home. In spite of the Victorian habit of meticulously documenting public life, domestic details were generally ignored. Yet Summerscale, by trawling through archives of contemporary newspapers, made an interesting discovery: 'I realised that the most fantastic source of getting a lot of domestic detail about people's lives was through crime. In newspaper reports of the court cases you've got a level of microscopic detail - you find out what time the family said prayersand what the nursemaid had for supper.'It became the perfect source for the kind of detail she was looking for.

At its simplest level, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a gripping and not inconsiderably disturbing true-life detective story. In 1860, a three-year-old boy was murdered in a country house on the border of Somerset and Wiltshire. His throat was cut, he was suffocated and stabbed, and his body was stuffed down a servants' privy. Most horrifying of all, the culprit had to be a member of the household - either one of the servants or one of the family. Mr Whicher, a working-class policeman with a pockmarked face, was one of the newly established London detectives. He is called to the scene at Road Hill House and immediately sets about interviewing the household and establishing the motive. However, Mr Whicher's investigation and final conclusions would cause a public outcry and result in his widespread condemnation.

While looking through the transcripts of contemporary trials, this case stood out against the others because of its truly horrifying nature and because it introduced Summerscale to the shadowy character of the real-life detective, Mr Jack Whicher. Whicher was one of the first of eight detectives established in England only twenty years before. This new wing of the constabulary had seen 20 years of high profile success and widespread public support, verging on adulation. Summerscale explains how 'in a time of enormous spiritual crisis, there was great value invested in the detective, a sort of displacement of religious faith'. These men appealed on one hand to the Victorian affection for rationalism and the supremacy of intellect over man's baser instincts. Like archaeologists and geologists, the detective was seen as one of the new heroes of science and reason, carefully observing human relationships and objects in order to solve a riddle, much as Darwin had done by looking at fossils. On the other hand, their ability to intuit the criminal mind, to capture the culprit as if by magic, appealed to a contemporary fascination with spiritualism and fantasy. Summerscale is quick to point out that 'it is of course too much to place on individuals; when a figure like that, who has had all this imaginative investment, fails to deliver perfection and certainty, then they're quite likely to be punished pretty severely for that'. This, she believes, explains the backlash against Whicher and the general negative sentiment towards detectives that would prevail in the following decades. The public began to pick holes in what they saw, to punish Whicher for their disappointment. He was seen as a working-class man invading the privacy and sanctity of the English middle-class home 'in a waythat the local constabulary knew better than to do'. Rather than an explorer, he was a snoop; rather than an intellectual mastermind protecting the middle classes from a dangerous criminal element, he was part of a sinister, secretive method of surveillance.

As well as exploring contemporary attitudes towards the detective and the reason for them, Summerscale was also able to use the case to map the evolution of detective fiction. Even considering earlier contributions from the likes of Edgar Allan Poe with The Murders on the Rue Morgue, this was the era that saw the birth of the detective thriller. As such, Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff from The Moonstone and Charles Dickens' Inspector Bucket from Bleak House were inspired by the real-life Whicher. Summerscale argues that even now, in the likes of Frost, Rebus and Morse, something of Whicher survives: 'I was struck when I was writing about Whicher by how much similarity there was between him and the police detectives now. I think there are two strands: the amateur sort of magic detective, and then the downtrodden, hard-bitten, taciturn, troubled, slightly haunted figures often in conflict with authority, who are usually rather brilliant and likeable but battered.'

Even more than the heroes themselves, however, Summerscale saw that the details of the case would have a profound influence on the structure of the detective novel itself: the middle-class country house, the murder committed by someone in the household, the bungling local constabulary, an out-of-town, mysterious detective. It is as if this heinous crime, never fully solved or understood, is being constantly replayed and resolved in subsequent fictional mirrors. This parallel encouraged Summerscale to shape her book like the fictional thrillers it inspired: we learn everything as Whicher does, following his investigation from day-to-day as Summerscale carefully maps where he was, who he interviewed, what he saw, what he discovered and when. This structure allows 'the reader to measure the proximities but also the distances between the real life and the fiction that we read and to see how it does and doesn't fit into that mould'. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher follows the usual pattern of murder and investigation. However, whereas in the fictional counterpart there would be a grand denouement where the suspects meet in the library and the murderer is exposed as Mrs Peacock with the lead piping in the boiler room, no such neat conclusion is possible in this real-life story.

There are threads left untied; we are never absolutely sure of who did what, or of why they did it. Summerscale is not afraid to show us 'the heroic figures that are never quite as heroic', nor does she shy away from the awkwardness of real life.Having said that, there are some conclusions. Summerscale couldn't quite bear to leave it hanging; gratifying her thriller reader's instinct for resolution, she lets herself be convinced by Whicher's argument. However, the point remains: we can enjoy a fictional proximity to horror and violence only if it is ultimately explained and resolved. We ask this of our fiction, even though in life these events are not so easily or neatly resolved.

The prize money from the Samuel Johnson award means that Summerscale is able to continue writing full time. When asked if she'll break away from non-fiction, she's unsure. She finds the research too enjoyable, and much like using pegs to hang washing on a line, she likes to use factual details to pin down her story and stop it from blowing away: 'I gave myself a tremendous amount of creative freedom with how to tell the story, how to shape it, the structure, and yet I had all these gritty, real details to play with, to hang it on. I really enjoyed that - this particular tension seems to work for me. Although who knows, maybe I'll write a novel.'

Friday, 1 August, 2008

In Interviews

More

Buy books

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

Books are purchased through Amazon UK. Link opens in a new window.

Untitled Books

Issue 20 / February - March 2010

'At a time of enormous spiritual crisis, there was great value invested in the detective, a sort of displacement of religious faith.'