And although Henry James's terrifying novella The Turn of the Screw was not directly inspired by the Road Hill murder - James said he based it on an anecdote told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury - it was alive with the eerie doubts and slippages of the case: a governess who might be a force for good or evil, the enigmatic children in her charge, a country house steeped in secrets.Ī Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest. Elements of the case surfaced in Charles Dickens' last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Whicher was the inspiration for that story's cryptic Sergeant Cuff, who has influenced nearly every detective hero since. Eliot as the first and best of all English detective novels. It helped shape the fiction of the 1860s and beyond, most obviously Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, which was described by T.S. It riveted the people of England, hundreds of whom wrote to the newspapers, to the Home Secretary and to Scotland Yard with their solutions. The Road Hill case turned everyone detective. The officer who investigated the murder at Road Hill House - Detective-Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard - was one of the eight men who formed this fledgling force. The first fictional sleuth, Auguste Dupin, appeared in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the rue Morgue' in 1841, and the first real detectives in the English-speaking world were appointed by the London Metropolitan Police the next year. For the country as a whole, the murder at Road Hill became a kind of myth - a dark fable about the Victorian family and the dangers of detection.Ī detective was a recent invention. For the family of the victim, it was a murder of unusual horror, which threw suspicion on almost everyone within the house.

The search for the killer threatened the career of one of the first and greatest detectives, inspired a 'detective-fever' throughout England, and set the course of detective fiction. This is the story of a murder committed in an English country house in 1860, perhaps the most disturbing murder of its time.

The suspicions of mr whicher book