The subtitle to this is ‘A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great
Victorian Detective’ which is a fairly melodramatic summing up. All
murder is shocking, in its own way, surely? As for the undoing of the
great Victorian detective, he failed to get a conviction, which is
hardly the world’s worst offence. But I suppose ‘Case Dismissed for Lack
of Evidence’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, and although the
detective in question was castigated for supposedly mishandling the
case, he was subsequently vindicated. Not much of an undoing.
The
murder itself, in 1860, and the events surrounding it, are actually
quite a small part of the book. A three year old boy is removed from his
cot in the middle of the night, has his throat cut and the body stuffed
down an outside privy. The difficulty is that the house was securely
locked up, so that only one of the inmates - twelve members of a middle
class family and their servants - could have done it. There is a lot of
detail given about precisely where everyone was and what they did and at
what time, all gleaned from official accounts or other contemporary
documents, but this is not an Agatha Christie novel, where everyone has a
motive. The local police soon devise a favoured theory and pinpoint a
suspect, but there’s a lack of evidence. So a detective is despatched
from London to solve the case. He has a different theory and suspect,
but again there’s no evidence beyond the circumstantial.
In a
work of fiction, a story like this would be filled with a gradually
revealed pattern of clues, but real life is not so neat. Instead, the
author tells us a great deal of mundane detail about train times and
weather and laundry arrangements and the entire life histories of the
family members, the servants, the local people and the detective. There
are maps and family trees and lists of principal characters and
photographs. There are prices for items, and menus, and descriptions of
people and places. Undoubtedly a lot of research has been done, but the
dry-as-dust presentation and the choppy arrangement of it, hopping about
from one character to another, remove any sense of engagement with the
characters or the situation. It reads like a poorly organised research
paper. There wasn’t much drama, either, despite the inherently
sensational nature of the murder itself. The most interesting aspect
(for me), the detective’s theory of whodunit (the suspicions of the
title) and his reasons for that, are barely mentioned in passing, so
that he appears to jump to that conclusion almost by instinct, and not
by detective work at all.
The author has made some attempt to
draw out significant aspects of social history which are relevant to the
case. The policy of training specialised detectives for serious crimes
was in its infancy, and this particular murder was a notable failure.
There was also a certain amount of disparagement from local worthies and
the press about the working class detectives setting out to scrutinise
the respectable lives of their betters. Fictionalised detective stories
began at about this time, and the country house murder behind locked
doors was an inspiration for an entire genre. To my mind, the most
shocking information was the family tree. The patriarch had fathered ten
children by his first wife, of whom no less than five died in infancy
and another as a young man, and a further five by his second wife
(formerly the governess), one of whom was the murdered boy. Both wives
died young.
In the end, there is a resolution of sorts, although
(as with all such high-profile crimes) there continued to be doubts ever
after about the exact sequence of events, and where the blame truly
lay. The book is not the most well-presented I’ve ever seen, and is too
loaded down with dull, irrelevant detail, nor do the characters and
their desires and motivations ever really come to life, but perhaps it
is in the nature of a factual book like this to scrupulously lay out all
the possibilities, rather than over-dramatising the author’s preferred
version of events. I found it a quick, easy read, engrossing in parts
and mostly enjoyable. Three stars.
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