We live in a world where more is always considered better, but sometimes more is not just more, it's actually less.
I just finished reading The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale. Not only was it a New York Times' Best Seller but it also won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Suspicions is about the real life murder mystery that inspired crime fiction, epitomized by writers like Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The premise is promising enough...a country manor is locked up for the night. In the morning the three-year old son of the family is found to be missing. His body is soon discovered. Since the house was so well fortified from the outside, the crime must have been committed by one of the inmates of the house. It's a true-life who-dunnit. The local police officials bungle about not getting anywhere. Enter one of Scotland Yard's newly anointed detectives, Mr. Jack Whicher. As much as this book is about the murder at Road Hill House, it is also about the new art of detection and the public's fascination and repulsion of this new 'science'.
It is not so much that I mind Summerscale's abundant use of texts from the mid-19th century, indeed her details about other crimes occurring at the same time was very interesting, it was more that it became redundant by page 150. OK, we get it, people at the time were disgusted with the way the police pried into private family matters. It was unseemly and undignified. Do we really need 50 quotes on the subject? No...it was overkill and took away from the rest of the book. Summerscale would have done better to cut her manuscript down by 100 pages. But of course, editing is a lost art.
I could write a lengthy conclusion, summarizing this post with a pithy last remark; but in taking my lesson of brevity I will just say that this book, though interesting, really wasn't worth all the praise that it has received.
