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Murder mystery that led to Holmes and Morse is £30,000 winner
Benedict Moore-Bridger, Evening Standard16 Jul 2008
An account of a gruesome Victorian murder which sparked our obsession with detective novels has won the world's most lucrative non-fiction book prize.
The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder At Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale, is the first crime book to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.
The book beat the favourite - a biography of writer VS Naipaul - to take the £30,000 prize last night at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall.
The infamous 1860 country-house murder of a three-year-old boy in a Wiltshire home inspired writers from Charles Dickens to Arthur Conan Doyle. It provoked national outrage a and led Scotland Yard to send its best man, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, to investigate.
Mr Whicher, "a working-class London copper with a pock-marked face and a taste for brandy", was tasked with solving a murder mystery in which the grieving family were suspects.
One of the first eight detectives in the English-speaking world, Mr Whicher became a model for today's fictional sleuths. But his career was ruined by the case, which launched an enduring national obsession with crime detection. Flawed, haunted figures such as Philip Marlowe, Inspector Morse and DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect are said to be his true successors.
As well as revisiting the murder itself, the book by London writer Summerscale throws light on the earliest days of detection and detective fiction.
Her first book, The Queen Of Whale Cay - a biography of the Twenties lesbian speedboat racer who fell in love with a leather doll - won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1998.
Summerscale, a former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, left the paper in 2005 to pursue a career as a full-time author. Rosie Boycott, chairwoman of the judges, said: "The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher is a dramatic page-turning detective yarn of a real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction.
"Kate Summerscale has brilliantly merged scrupulous archival research with vivid storytelling that reads with the pace of a Victorian thriller.
"The book is a rare work of non-fiction that mimics suspense genre and leaves one gripped until the final paragraph. We can't think of a better winner for the 10th year of the prize."
