The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder & the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective-威彻先生的疑

作者：Summerscale Kate

书名：The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder & the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective《威彻先生的疑虑：令人震惊的谋杀和维多利亚侦探的毁灭》

中文简介：《威彻先生的疑虑》是一部具有煽动性的非小说作品，读起来像维多利亚时代的惊悚片，在这部作品中，凯特·萨默斯凯尔塑造了一个才华横溢的多层叙事，其结构如同其优美的作品一样巧妙。

英文简介：The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.

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.

At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.