Mystery Read-A-Thon: 2.5 Hours In

I have been reading for 2.5 hours now and my total page count is 102. My reading has been solely that of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. I am finding this book not only interesting and compelling, but an easy read. Summerscale has written a true life mystery with incredible skill. One of the things most interesting to me is the examination of the relatively new “science” of detection.

Summerscale also gives the reader insight into the new language of detection:

The word ‘clue’ derives from ‘clew’, meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean ‘that which point the way’ because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. The writers of the mid-nineteenth century still had this image in mind when the used the word. ‘There is always a pleasure in unraveling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty,’ observed Elizabeth Gaskell in 1848. ‘I thought I saw the end of a good clew,’ said the narrator of Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective (1864). William Wills, Dickens’ deputy, paid tribute in 1850 to Whicher’s brilliance by observing that the detective found the way even when ‘every clue seems cut off’. ‘I thought I had my hand on the clue,’ declared the narrator of The Woman in White in an installment published in June 1860. ‘How little I knew, then, of the windings of the labyrinth which were still to mislead me!’ A plot was a knot, and a story ended in a ‘denouement’, an unknotting. - from The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, page 68 -

She also allows the reader to gain understanding of the middle and upper class Victorian households and how upholding privacy and secrecy contributed to the difficulty in solving the murder.

Privacy had become the essential attribute of the middle-class Victorian family, and the bourgeoisie acquired an expertise in secrecy (the word ’secretive’ was first recorded in 1853). - from The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, page 109 -

I am taking a short break now to shower and eat a bit…and then I’ll be back to finish this wonderful book.