![]() ![]() After the entire household was shut up tight, Francis Saville Kent, not quite four years old, was taken from his bed while still asleep in the dead of night and brutally murdered. In the early hours of June 29, 1860, a terrible crime occurred in the town of Road, Wiltshire County. Whicher looking exactly like Alun Armstrong, the actor who portrayed Inspector Bucket so perfectly in the 2005 BBC adaptation. As I read the book, I couldn't help but picture Mr. Whicher, was the inspiration for several fictional detectives, including one my personal favorites, Inspector Bucket in Charles Dickens' Bleak House. This book explores a sensational case that mesmerized the British public in 1860. Summerscale shows the influences of this case, as well as other Victorian true crimes, on such famous novelists as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. ![]() Whicher gives great insight into the Victorian frenzied fascination with crimes and detection. If you have any interest at all in Victorian sensational or detective fiction, or in the neo-Victorian detective fiction, this book will probably interest you as much as it did me. ![]()
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