Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, thirteen-year-old Robert Coombes and his twelve-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were finally called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the 'penny dreadful' novels that Robert loved to read. In The Wicked Boy, Kate Summerscale has uncovered a fascinating true story of murder and morality - it is not just a meticulous examination of a shocking Victorian case, but also a compelling account of its aftermath, and of man's capacity to overcome the past.
Kate Summerscale, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, brilliantly re-creates the Victorian world, chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson, wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collide with a society clinging to rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of marriage, and female sexuality.
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 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
Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone to Dashiell
Hammett's Sam Spade.
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work
of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in
it author Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant,
multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it
is beautifully written.
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