Monday, January 19, 2009

Suspicious

Yesterday I bought "The Suspicions of Mr Whicher", largely because I'd seen someone at work reading it, liked the title and then noticed it in the bookshop and decided to flick through it, rather than because I had any idea what it was about. Who needs fancy advertising techniques, anyway?

Luckily, it turned out to be brilliant - it's a detailed true account of an 1860 murder investigation, and what's best about it is the picture it gives of the very earliest days of police detectives. The developing vocabulary of detective fact and fiction is really fascinating, and the writer (Kate Summerscale) has a real knack for picking up on the little nuances of meaning in 150-year-old language. I'd recommend the book to anyone!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I could have told you that, Ben AND lent you my copy!

Anonymous said...

That's good to hear, as my reading group just picked it out last night as the book to read after our current choice!

Can you e-mail me some stuff about the Cambridge memory thing in about a month, by the way, and I'll pass it around some people I know here.

Zoomy said...

Well, yay! It's a good book for a book group - the writer can't quite resist pointing the finger at her favourite suspect, but there's plenty of room for a whodunnit discussion with lots of possibilities! Have fun!