Kate Symmerscale Could Learn a Thing or Two from Drew Brees

Kate Summerscale's non-fiction Victorian detective novel The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher begins with an exciting rush of information about the detecting protagonist Jonathan Whicher and the murder case (the murder at Road Hill) that he investigates. Like Edgar Allen Poe in his Dupin detective stories, Summerscale gives the reader an enormous amount of interesting information to include the reader in the case. We learn nearly everything there is to know about the murder of Saville Kent, the four year old son of Samuel Kent, and Mr. Whicher's findings concerning the case. However, after Summerscale reveals all this gory, intriguing information, she goes on to talk about...coral and copulating octopuses? Precisely.

After the mystery of the murder at Road Hill is solved and Mr. Whicher is somewhat redeemed (though the title claims that the case was the undoing of Whicher, it eventually led to a rather successful private detective practice, which doesn't sound very much like an undoing at all) Summerscale gives page after page after Trivial Pursuit fact-filled page of information concerning the lives of Constance, William Kent, Samuel Kent, Mr. Whicher, and a few other characters. In these final eighty pages or so we learn of William Kent's love affair with corals and his desire to watch octopuses get it on. Unlike Drew Brees, Kate Summerscale fails to"Finish Strong" with this non-fiction novel.

Though the final third of the novel falls flat, the initial two-thirds provide a valuable insight into the Victorian era. Summerscale brings the reader inside the Victorian home and shows us all the skeletons in the Kent family's closet, thus breaking down the Victorian facade of propriety and grace. Quoting Stapleton on page 220, Summerscale claims that the murder at Road Hill was evidence of a Darwinian devolution in well-to-do Victorian families. Summerscale should have developed this idea, which hearkens back to ideas presented in Wells' The Time Machine and Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, more fully in the final third of the text.

If, as a reviewer, I must give a recommendation of this novel, I would recommend it. The excitement of the first 220 pages outweighs the disappointment of the final 100 pages, and the insights into the doings of a real Victorian family are worth the coral digressions.