36. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

Category: 50 Books

36. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale

More true crime, anyone?

I wasn’t sure if I would like this one, I checked it out because I liked the title and the artwork on the cover, and because I’m a sucker for the true crime, but I was concerned because Victorian England is my least favorite thing to read about.

This awesome book went above and beyond the ol’ true crime genre. Sure there’s a “unsolved” murder in the book, but what makes this book so different is that it goes into the history of the detective as well as the literary history of the detective novel. The historical and literary parts of the book were so interesting that the murder itself (while quite gruesome and terrible all around) seemed to be just a vehicle for the history and literature bits. That’s not a bad thing, and I really enjoyed it.

I will say that the book was about 30 to 50 pages too long. Toward the very end I was just wanting the book over, not that it was boring exactly, it wasn’t, there was just some talking about the same thing over and over that if it had been eliminated it would have been a shorter book, but more concise and perfect.

If you like true crime as well as literature, definitely give this one a go.

It gets one Canseco for redundancy.

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