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The murder at road hill house is an interesting case. The reviews are full of baffled blood & gore and whodunnit aficionados. I always look through the photographs immediately, can't help myself. I actually felt the detective thread was lost a little too much as the book went on-- I would have liked to see it strengthened, possibly with examples from other famous murder cases.It isn't a perfect book. Well, I for one liked it. She's written a book which is nearly guaranteed not to appeal to many likely to read it. Don't page through the photographs ahead of time if you want to be suprised about the bad guy. If you're a potential reader who thinks detail gets in the way of the plot, this will probably not be the book for you.
Whicher fits very well into my sweet spot between loving mysteries and loving historical analysis. I have to feel at least a little bit sorry for Kate Summerscale. Not sure quite why. Pacing.Anyhow. There aren't actually all that many of those).One of the more interesting aspects of the book is the image of the detective in the consciousness of the time.
(Note: I don't mean gory details. Think of this as an exploration of the perception of crime in the 19th century which happens to use a single crime as its focus. I didn't care that I was able to figure out the killer from the pictures, but you might.Good reading. Whicher:This isn't True Crime in its most popular sense. Enough documentation exists about the people involved so that there is some real meat on the bones for the reader. Some good things to know if you're contemplating buying The Suspicions of Mr. She's written a true crime novel which relentlessly puts in lots of historical detail about the nature of the detective in Victorian culture.
It started dragging a bit somewhere in the last few chapters. Summerscale obviously likes detail. The Suspicions of Mr. I like detail.
Other than that I can find no reason to suggest that anyone interested in this book should be steered away from acquiring it. This having been said the case alone is interesting enough to hold one's attention and make it very hard to put the book down and I for one very much appreciated the glimpses into Victorian England outside of (or, at least, concurrent with) the murder. Most importantly it also lacks the pull of suspense that books of this type ought to have.
She presents us with the types of fabric used to make uniforms, attitudes towards menstrual blood as opposed to "normal" blood, the Victorian sense of privacy, et cetera. The author does not seek to shock or titillate but to provide a very well-researched, exhaustive study of a tragic historical event. All these things make for a thorough sense of the "wholeness" of the murder, unlike a dramatic narrative designed for thrills.
I agree with many of the reviewers who commented that this book is a bit dry and repetitive (sometimes the repetition is simply a result of the dryness and is not actually there). Some reviewers have complained about the fact that the author describes too many things (.). Highly recommended for those who want something a bit more than Jack-The-Ripper morgue shots.
One tends to want true-crime books to read like novels to some extent and this one, for the most part, does not. The author does a fine job of presenting the facts of the case and the contemporary social environment in which so much of the case depended.
It is an interesting fact to learn the ways in which this "true crime" event influenced the development of that wonderful genre, but by itself it is not the stuff of a book-length treatment. Much better to read, say, The Meaning of Night or The Thirteenth Tale, if you want a recently written book of this style.
The telling, while careful and factual, amounts at many points, simply to pedestrian reportage. As a matter of nonfiction, it is alright, but, beyond the basic point above, only somewhat interesting.
I am a great lover of Victorian Detective Fiction; the Woman in White is surely on my all-time top ten. Neither the plot nor the literary turns compare.
On the whole, I could have skipped it. But this book was a disappointment.
As a story, this one simply cannot hold up in comparison to an exciting fiction.
Whicher's suspicions. This really was more than just a story about Mr. I highly recommend it. It was a terrible murder and his thoughts and the shock that happened 5 years later were fascinating. Whicher. It was an education into detectives-- when English policemen became detectives; thoughts on their work; written accounts of their work and the derivation of words used in the profession.I really enjoyed those asides as well as Mr.
The author also devotes quite a bit of paper to how this infamous case may have influenced the nascent field of detective fiction, including works by such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. But the narrative wanders off in too many directions, thus unraveling the tension.
Whicher. This is the type of problem it's difficult for an author to be objective about, but where was the editor.There is much to like in The Suspicions of Mr.
This non-fiction book contains all the ingredients of the classic English country-house mystery: a shocking murder, an isolated setting, a finite circle of suspects who all behave suspiciously in order to conceal deep, dark secrets, and the "outsider" detective brought in to figure out "whodunit." Within the covers of this book lie a hundred pages of spellbinding suspense woven through a fascinating backdrop of Victorian society. The glimpses we get of the Victorian legal system and the birth of Scotland Yard certainly have a place in this tale.
Just be prepared to sift through the rest. Unfortunately, this book is three hundred pages long.The remaining pages are stuffed with repetitious rehashings of various theories stitched together from the scanty threads of evidence, along with a monotonous parade of quotes lifted from newspaper coverage of the time--long on speculation and sensationalism but short on facts.
Interesting, but difficult to see the relevance of including so many fictional passages in a non-fiction account of a true crime.As other reviewers have pointed out, this author has clearly done a lot of research.
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