Though the subtitle of this book is “The Murder at Road Hill House,” and though a lot of it does focus on that particular crime (the murder of a three-year-old child in 1860), it also covers a lot of additional ground, so it’s part true-crime and part cultural criticism about detectives, detective fiction, Victorian sensation novels, privacy in the Victorian era, and more. True crime isn’t really my genre, so this wasn’t totally the book for me, though I was interested in the historical/literary elements about Victorian novels and Victorian anxieties. I also was interested in the stories of where various family members ended up, post-murder: I might be into a book just about one of the victim’s half-brothers, who ended up becoming a naturalist who worked in Australia and photographed Great Barrier Reef corals.
But anyway, right: this book proceeds chronologically from the murder onwards, looking at the crime, the initial investigations, and the further aftermath. The Mr Whicher of the title is a London detective who was called to assist with the investigation two weeks after the killing; there’s a lot about his theories (that the child was killed by his half-sister, Constance, possibly with the help of her brother, William) vs. the theories of the local police (that the child was killed by his father and the nursemaid, after the child woke in the night and saw his father in the nursemaid’s bed). There are questions about the father’s possible propensity towards extramarital affairs: his second wife (the mother of the dead child) used to be the family governess, and he may have been sexually involved with her before the death of his first wife. There are also questions about Constance’s sanity, or lack thereof: there are rumors that her mother was insane, and Victorians were big into the idea of hereditary madness, especially when it came to mothers and daughters. It seems clear from the fact that the house was locked for the night when the murder took place that the killer was someone in the house itself, but aside from the body of the dead child, there isn’t a lot of evidence: no murder weapon is found, and the doctors who examine the boy’s body can’t agree whether he was fully or partially suffocated and then had his throat cut, or whether he just had his throat cut. Not quite a spoiler: five years after the murder, someone confesses, but it’s still unclear whether or not that person actually committed the crime.
I think what I liked best about this book was all the stuff about the figure of the detective, and the tensions around that figure. There’s the comforting idea that a Victorian detective “offered science, conviction, stories that could organise chaos” (xii) but there’s also discomfort with the idea of a case being shaped by a detective’s hunches/suspicions, and discomfort with a detective who didn’t necessarily come from the middle classes prying into middle class family homes/lives. Overall, though, I think I definitely prefer reading about fictional crimes to reading about real ones: I’m not actually sure if I’ve ever read a true-crime book before, and I think having read this one I feel like I’d rather read some Wilkie Collins instead, if I’m in the mood for Victorian detective stories in the future.
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