Initially intriguing real-life story about murder in Victorian England, that turned out somehow less interesting that expected - contrary to all the compliments on the book's cover ("gripping", "unputdownable") I have found this book long-winded, rambling and unnecessarily expanded. The crime story itself is fascinating and it caught the attention of the whole country in 1860 (even Charles Dickens had his opinion of what actually happened) but to be honest, if Kate Summerscale simply stuck to the story, she would have one nice, long newspaper article - in order to actually built book around this, she used pages and pages of backtracking explanations about geography, characters, social classes, education of the time and Victorians in general. Her favorite device is almost predictable sidetracking: if someone enters the train at Paddington train station, there goes a chapter about Paddington train station at that time. There is a ton of not really interesting information unrelated to crime itself (backgrounds of this and that character) that eventually somehow drains the energy and interest from a reader. I almost feared any more information about the weather, buildings, architecture or facts because it over-balanced and over-shadowed story that was gripping and interesting itself.
This is what happened: during a quiet, sleepy night in a locked, secured and respected family house, there was a murder discovered some time in a morning. A little child had disappeared from his bed and after a frantic search found killed and thrown in a "privy" (outhouse toilet). Since all the windows and doors were locked from inside, suspected was absolutely everybody who was inside - including father, his second wife (ex-governess), children, nursemaid, cook, servants, gardener and even outside help (washerwoman, shoemaker, butcher, neighbours). Since local police was unused to crime of this calibre and curiosity of the whole nation turned into maniacal frenzy (it was a favourite table conversation and thousands of people had their own theories about it) a serious and successful detective was sent to investigate the case - Mr.Whicher does his job as detectives should, uncovering every corner of a family house, however he is soon heavily criticised in media about being "ruthless" and not having "respect" for family privacy. It sounds strange today - specially because we are talking about crime investigation here - but at this time in history apparently Victorians were very sensitive about their privacy, intrusion and class distinctions - somehow the focus of the attention moved from a murder and crime itself to Mr.Whicher who (in newspaper's opinion) was low-class, greedy and immoral person because he dared to search and expose blood-stained nightgown (for example) where respected people would not even talk about such private subject.
The crime itself was eventually solved - for all his accomplishments, Mr.Whicher was finished and retired soon. Talented, capable and clear-headed detective had a bad luck to work in time when class distinction was still very important and suspected killers were expected to have been treated with dignity because of their social status. Even though he was proven to have been correct in his suspicion, Whicher was never recognised for this. Summerscale uses her book to explain way too many things at once - crime story, status of early detective policemen, background of all the characters and even chapter or two of what happened afterwards. There is even a tantalising suggestion that murderer is not the one who got locked up. Myself I found a book little bit too meandering but must admit that Summerscale did excellent research of the era and she cleverly connected this real life story with its later literary echoes (Wilkie Collin's "Moonstone" for example). Very interesting story but not exactly "gripping".
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