Law in Popular Culture
True-Crime Book Wins $60K Prize
Posted Jul 16, 2008, 01:08 pm CST
By Martha Neil
A non-fiction novel about a notorious unsolved murder of a child that happened more than 100 years ago has won a pricey prize from the BBC.
Kate Summerscale says she got the idea for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill House when she happened to see an 1890s anthology of unsolved crimes that discussed the case, reports the London Times. It concerns the 1860 murder of a 3-year-old boy son of a factory inspector at his family's country house. Detective Inspector Jack Whicher, of Scotland Yard, eventually decided the murder was a member of the household, but no one was ever convicted in the case.
Summerscale's book is “a dramatic page-turning detective yarn of a real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction," says Rosie Boycott, who chaired the judging committee. It "has brilliantly merged scrupulous archival research with vivid storytelling that reads with the pace of a Victorian thriller."
Summerscale received a $60,000 BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for the book.
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