Kate Summerscale est une auteure anglaise célébrée pour ses récits historiques méticuleusement documentés et captivants. Elle possède un talent remarquable pour déterrer des histoires fascinantes, souvent négligées, et leur donner vie de manière vivante grâce à sa sensibilité littéraire aiguë. Le travail de Summerscale explore les complexités du passé, tissant habilement des récits factuels avec des analyses perspicaces de la motivation humaine et des dynamiques sociales. Son approche narrative distinctive invite les lecteurs à s'immerger dans d'intrigants mystères historiques, révélant les courants plus profonds de l'expérience humaine.
Joe Carstairs was born in London in 1900, the daughter of a Scottish colonel and an American heiress. She was educated in Connecticut and returned to Europe in 1916, to drive ambulances for the Women's Legion in France. She deserted her husband at the church door (marriage having been a prerequisite of her coming into her $4 million inheritance) and settled in England, where she took up motor-boat racing, winning many trophies, and established a boatyard at Cowes.
'Once more, Kate Summerscale shatters our preconceptions of a classic crime' Val McDermid From Britain's top-selling true crime writer and author of Sunday Times #1 bestseller THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER... London, 1953. Police discover the bodies of three young women hidden in a wall at 10 Rillington Place, a dingy terrace house in Notting Hill. On searching the building, th[Bokinfo].
When the married Isabella Robinson was introduced to the dashing Edward Lane at a party in 1850, she was utterly enchanted. He was 'fascinating', she told her diary, before chastising herself for being so susceptible to a man's charms. But a wish had taken hold of her, and she was to find it hard to shake...In one of the most notorious divorce cases of the nineteenth century, Isabella Robinson's scandalous secrets were exposed to the world. Kate Summerscale brings vividly to life a frustrated Victorian wife's longing for passion and learning, companionship and love, in a society clinging to rigid ideas about marriage and female sexuality.
It is midnight on 30th June 1860 and all is quiet in the Kent family's elegant house in Road, Wiltshire. The next morning, however, they wake to find that their youngest son has been the victim of an unimaginably gruesome murder - the house was bolted from the inside. As Jack Whicher, the most celebrated detective of his day, arrives at Road to track down the killer, the murder provokes national hysteria at the thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealously, loneliness and loathing.
The extraordinary story of a 1930s ghost hunt, and the woman who confounded the world, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
360pages
13 heures de lecture
The dramatic story of a real-life murder that inspired modern detective fiction unfolds in June 1860 when three-year-old Saville Kent was discovered at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. This horrific crime shocked England and ignited a national obsession with detection, ultimately undermining the career of one of the greatest detectives of the time. At this point, the detective was a novel concept, with only eight in all of England, and rarely called beyond London. However, the shocking nature of the crime prompted Scotland Yard to dispatch its best investigator, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly suspected that the murderer was someone within the family, but lacking sufficient evidence or a confession, he returned to London defeated. Although he would be vindicated five years later, Whicher's true legacy lies in the fictional detectives that emerged from his story—tough, quirky, and all-seeing figures like Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. This provocative nonfiction work reads like a Victorian thriller, with a brilliantly layered narrative that is both cleverly constructed and beautifully written.
De geheime liefde van een getrouwde Engelse vrouw voor een tien jaar jongere, getrouwde medisch student leidt in 1858 tot het eerste Britse echtscheidingsproces.
Engeland, 1860. Een lijk, een detective, een afgelegen landhuis en een verdachte familie met veel geheimen. Jack Whicher, een gevierd detective van Scotland Yard, wordt naar Road Hill House gestuurd om de moord op de driejarige kleuter Saville kent te onderzoeken. Met hulp van een onervaren lokaal politieteam en zonder enig feitelijk bewijs staat hij voor een schijnbaar onmogelijke taak - een van de rouwende bewoners moet de dader zijn. De moord leidt tot nationale hysterie. De gedachte wat zich allemaal achter de gesloten deuren van zomaar een respectabele familie op het platteland kan afspelen - onbetrouwbare bedienden, opstandige kinderen, gekte, jaloezie, eenzaamheid en haat - maakt mensen angstig, maar zorgt ook voor opwinding. Iedereen heeft zijn eigen theorie over wie de moordenaar is. Net als detective Whicher. In De vermoedens van Mr. Whicher reconstrueert Kate Summerscale op minutieuze wijze de feiten achter deze gruwelijke zaak. Met haar levendige vertelstem en de buitengewoon intelligente manier waarop ze het mysterie langzaam ontrafelt, heeft ze een meesterlijk boek geschreven dat leest als een thriller.
