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Kate Summerscale: ‘I know how intense the judging debates can be’ |
Author’s Suspicions clinch a top award
Detective work on a Victorian murder impressed the judges of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Gerald Isaaman met the astonished winner
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House.
By Kate Summerscale. Bloomsbury £14.99.
AS a journalist and former national newspaper literary editor, Kate Summerscale knows the inside secret score and the hassle when it comes to major book prizes.
Yet there is nothing like the intensity of being on the receiving end, despite her experience of helping to judge Peter Carey as the winner of the £50,000 Booker Prize for Fiction in 2001 and, a decade ago, deciding on historian Anthony Beevor as the winner of the first Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.
She looked somewhat bemused awaiting the result of this year’s £30,000 BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize, obviously anxious since her own murderous tale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, was on the final shortlist (reviewed in the New Journal on June 19).
And she won, hands down in fact since the judges were obviously overwhelmed by – and unanimous about – the merit of a sorrowful yet exciting saga of the death of four-year-old Saville Kent, in an elegant Wiltshire mansion on a June night way back in 1860.
“I was astonished,” she told me at her home in West Hampstead. “I know how intense and changeable the judging debates can be. It was nerve-wracking to be on the receiving end, but thrilling too, of course. I feel very lucky.”
Her book, published by Bloomsbury, has already sold more than 20,000 copies, a real achievement for any work of non-fiction, though it’s fair to say that The Suspicions of Mr Whicher has an innate fiction feel, the more so because its unsung hero is a very remarkable special case.
Indeed, the gruesome murder was among the first of it kind to create a national outcry as Jack Whicher, the most celebrated detective of the newly formed Scotland Yard, was given the task of solving the case, albeit with the press on his back and everyone hysterically offering crazy opinions.
And though the true story has been lost in time – Jack the Ripper a few decades on took over – it inspired the first classic modern thriller to be written as such, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and its echo entered the works of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and even Henry James.
Kate, 42, who spent a year researching every aspect of the murder – which is why her book is packed with fascinating detail – came to know Jack Whicher. “I felt so close to Jack by the time I finished the book,” she said. “I’d spent so many hours trying to discover tiny details about his life, and I had made him my guide through the story. I tried to reconstruct minutely his investigation of the murder, to see the scene through his eyes. And I admired his ingenuity and courage.
“He solved the case but, because he could not substantiate his hunches, he was ruined by it. He became a scapegoat for all the public ambivalence about detection and surveillance that went on.”
In those early days – and even today – there was outrage over the police and the prurient press infiltrating people’s lives to uncover their worst secrets, as was the case at Road Hill, the scene of the crime. “A Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest,” she explains.
“He turned brutal crimes – the vestiges of beast in man – into intellectual puzzles. Many felt Mr Whicher’s enquiries culminated in a violation of the middle-class home, an assault on privacy, a crime to match the murder he had been sent to solve. His conclusions helped to create an era of voyeurism and suspicion.”
That too has a significant echo today, for, in the second year Kate spent writing the book, sometimes at dead of night, the Madeleine McCann case erupted, and as the mother of Sam, her six-year-old son, it affected her too. “I sometimes felt particularly acutely the horror of the murder I was writing about,” she recalled. “I was shocked to discover, I could forget the reality of the story, and treat it as a fascinating puzzle.
“When Madeleine disappeared I had nearly finished work on the book. I was struck by the similarities of how that case and the Road Hill case were covered – the national obsession with the story, the naming of the grieving family as suspects, the many hypotheses about what had happened – and why.
“Both were crimes that everybody talked about, and which would mark the families of the victims for life.”
Kate’s professionalism – and no doubt her wordly Fleet Street experience – thankfully took over.
She lived abroad, in Japan and Chile, as a child, making return trips to Hampstead to see her grandparents and, eventually, returning to the area full time. She won the Somerset Maugham award for her first best-seller, The Queen of Whale Cay, a biography of the eccentric “Joe” Carstairs, which was shortlisted for a Whitbread prize.
And she has poignant memories of visiting the country house where young Saville and the Kent family lived, where a dog barked sometime after midnight the night he died, and finding the layout and grounds virtually unchanged.
Indeed, what marks out her book is the extraordinary way it unpicks the social embroidery of those times with such care and sensitivity, to provide a graphic picture of country life 150 years ago.
“I gave a talk at a bookshop in Bath that was attended by several people who now live in Rode – formerly Road – where the murder took place,” she said. “They seemed fascinated by the story. One villager presented me with a copy of a newspaper reporting the arrival of Jack Whicher in Wiltshire in 1860, which was very touching.”
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