Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The book club member doing the choosing for this month is a fan of detective fiction. I know this on account of the fact that every one of her three choices occupied that genre. I dunno where these fans of a certain genre get off, foisting their preferences on a largely unwilling membership. You'd never catch a science fiction fan doing that.

I think the voting went so massively in favour of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher because it's based on a true story. Personally I'd have preferred Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. I saw it dramatised on BBC Children's telly when I was a boy but somehow never got around to reading the book. Anyway, this is what we were stuck with, and as it turned out "stuck with" is the right way to describe it.

I wrote "based on a true story" above but it would be more accurate to say the book recounts the true story. More or less verbatim. With just enough additional prose to tie all the pieces together, it assembles the facts from newspaper reports, police notes, eye witness interviews, court transcriptions and such other information as is attainable through research, and then presents them chronologically with minimal interpretation and virtually no embellishment. What I had thought would make the book interesting and unique - the fact that it represents itself as the first true detective story (at least insofar as it occurs fairly close to the formation of Scotland Yard, when detectives were first invented) and the beginning of a cultural icon that remains popular to this day: the mystery of a murder in a locked house with multiple occupants - actually didn't help to make the story compelling at all, for me.

The Kent family - a complex set up involving a large number of children and step-children along with the master of the house, his second wife (originally the nanny) and their coterie of servants - go to bed one night and wake up the following morning to the discovery that one of them - the youngest - has been taken from his bed and murdered.

So the book unravels as a series of events, observations on various character traits of the players, a little bit of history of each as far as it's relevant to the story (and, later, straying into aspects totally irrelevant), in a way that I found almost entirely unprepossessing and worthy of only the most marginal interest. I suppose it didn't help that I'd worked out who the murderer was by about halfway through the first chapter, and only the small question of finding out whether or not I was right kept me going. Once again the book's sleeve is full of reviews calling it "absolutely riveting", "brilliant" and "gripping" but naturally the publishers aren't going to print sleeve notes revealing it to be "boring", "tedious" or "terminally dull" are they?

The author makes no attempt to heighten the mystery, or represent the chief detective - the eponymous Whicher - as anything other than a methodically plodding introvert with about as much charisma as a bowl of porridge, whose previous "successes" as a detective uniformly arise from his habit of deciding who did it and then badgering them until they confess. I begin to see who the TV detective Columbo was based on.

The "revelations" about the private life of the Kent family are dreadfully predictable and once the murderer has confessed and been imprisoned the book degenerates into a chronicle of how that prison time is spent, and what happens subsequently to all the other detectives, lawyers and family members over the next (would you believe it?) hundred years. The whole work could easily have been shortened by a third, which might have helped the crawling pace of the narrative. In the end the only positive thing I can find to say about it is that I was surprised by the ending - but only because it came much sooner than expected, the last quarter of the book being made up of footnotes and bibliography.