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Published: 16 April 2009

Kate’s detective wins her yet more prizes

PRESIDENT Obama grabbed the headlines by taking the Tesco Biography of the Year award at the 2009 Galaxy British Book Awards last week, but the greatest achievement actually went to Kate Summerscale – from humble Lyncroft Gardens, West Hampstead, rather than the White House.
She was the really big winner at the event when her unconventional non-fiction thriller The Suspicions of Mr Whicher won the Galaxy Book of the Year award and also the Play.com Popular Non-Fiction Award. And those two prizes added to the £30,000 Samuel Johnson non-fiction prize that her tale of a Victorian detective scooped last year.
“It is almost exactly a year since the book was published. And I think it’s sold more than 250,000 copies so far. It has been so much more successful than could have imagined,” former journalist Kate told me.
The latest paperback edition of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, published by Bloomsbury – about a notorious child murder in Wiltshire when one summer night in 1860 a three-year-old, Saville Kent, was taken from his bed and found dead the next morning stabbed and almost decapitated – has a remarkable difference from the original hardback.
It contains a photograph that Kate never knew existed of the Scotland Yard detective Jack Whicher who embarked on a brilliant but dangerous investigation of the case.
“I wrote the book without ever having seen a picture of the detective hero of my story,” Kate explains. “As far as I could discover, no photographs of him had survived. But a few months after my book was published, I received a letter from a reader, who had come across two photographs of him in a solicitor’s archive in Hampshire. They gave me a little shiver. And I was very excited that at last I could set eyes on Mr Whicher. I was a little afraid – perhaps he wouldn’t be the man I had imagined.
“To my relief, the detective Whicher of my imagination and the Whicher found in the archive were a pretty close fit.”
GERALD ISAAMAN

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