Most Foul and Horrible

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective (2008) by Kate Summerscale: The 1860 murder of three-and-a-half-year-old Saville Kent in the County of Wiltshire in Southwest England became the crime story of the year. It would echo in fiction and fact for decades afterwards in everything from pulpy mysteries to Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." Saville Kent's murder had it all -- a locked-room mystery, family secrets and grievances, possible sexual improprieties, class resentments, and the dead and befouled body of a child stuffed mercilessly into the holding tank of an outdoor water closet.

Kate Summerscale does a nice job of structuring her non-fiction book as if it were one of the British mysteries that the events actually helped shape. The murder brought one of Scotland Yard's first eight detectives, Jack Whicher, to Wiltshire to investigate the murder. Unfortunately for Whicher, not only had two weeks passed since the murder by the time he arrived, but a startlingly inept local constabulary had allowed key pieces of evidence to disappear.

The result would be a failure of investigation and prosecution that ultimately caused Whicher to retire and a murderer to walk free. But that's only the beginning of the story. In 1865, a new twist in the case would emerge to enthrall and disgust Great Britain again. And things didn't end there. By the conclusion of her book, Summerscale has unearthed more evidence to shed further light on the awful murder.

Summerscale's prose is mostly workmanlike as she keeps the focus on the facts of the case and the various historical and literary events swirling around it. At points, she actually works a bit too hard to keep from being academic: the text buries illuminating observations about the classic English mystery from Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin in the end-notes. 

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher argues convincingly for the murder and its aftermath's effect on English attitudes towards detectives, and for the shaping of the evolving English mystery novel itself. The 19th-century English legal system also offers some strange moments. And as Summerscale follows various people well into the 20th century, a mystery that seems to have been solved instead offers up more mysteries.

At the centre of the narrative is Detective Whicher, a brilliant man who is one of England's pioneers of investigation and forensics. Around him are arrayed gutter journalists and well-meaning constables, devastated family members and family members with something to hide, a governess whose odd behaviour on the morning after the murder almost ruins her life, a washerwoman who inexplicably hides evidence from the police, a publicity-seeking vicar, a rebellious teenager, and Charles Dickens. It's a rich story, convincingly told. Highly recommended.

Nevermore (1996) by William Hjortsberg: The 1990's paperback version of Nevermore was clearly designed to resemble the paperback of The Alienist, Caleb Carr's riveting 1990's murder mystery set in New York that combined real people (most notably Teddy Roosevelt and William James) with fictional characters in pursuit of a serial killer. The interior front cover/two-page illustration actually seems to have come from the same photograph as the cover of The Alienist. Hmm.

The resemblance mostly ends there: Hjortsberg does combine fact and fiction, but the mystery and the serial killer are only a part of what the novel explores. As with Hjortsberg's more famous Falling Angel (made into the controversial 1987 movie Angel Heart starring Mickey Rourke and Robert De Niro), Nevermore is invested in mysteries and morality and the oddities of human nature, not in the prime importance of the aims and methods of detection.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in 1923 New York to begin his United States lecture tour on the Spirit World and his many attempts to communicate with the dead. Meanwhile, with vaudeville dying, Harry Houdini searches for a new money-making model for his magic shows while also waging a very public war against the mediums and spiritualists whom he views as being dangerous frauds. Despite their radical disagreement on spiritualism, however, Houdini and Doyle were friends. 

And a mysterious string of murders, each based on a different work by Edgar Allan Poe, soon seems to be working its way towards either Houdini or Doyle as the final victim.

Hjortsberg does a marvelous job of combining fact and fiction. He deploys a lengthy and detailed set of historical events and personages while keeping the novel light on its feet and often movingly dark and poetic. But Nevermore is also very funny at points. Nevermore's depiction of Houdini and Doyle makes them lively, fascinating individuals. And the sexy spirit medium who has dubbed herself Isis -- what's her game?

Nevermore is more of a novel with a mystery than a mystery novel. Still, it's satisfying in its fictional and factual elements. And you'll find out how a couple of Houdini's famous tricks were accomplished (though not all of the ones depicted in the novel). Hjortsberg even throws in a climax that's wittily movie-like. All this and the morose ghost of Edgar Allan Poe, visible only to Doyle. Highly recommended.

True Believers

The Psychic Mafia by M. Lamar Keene and Allen Spraggett (1976): M. Lamar Keene was a psychic huckster in the 1960's and 1970's who developed a conscience and decided to reveal the tricks mediums and psychics use to bilk their customers. This book is the result, and it's a fascinating glimpse into a world which, if anything, has grown larger and more fradulent in the nearly 40 years since The Psychic Mafia came out.

Keene calls his former compatriots 'the Psychic Mafia' because there's widespread communication and sharing of information between them, whether they call themselves spiritualists, mediums, or psychics. A medium in Florida may be able to 'read' astonishingly detailed facts about someone 'new' because information has been sent in advance from the medium that person usually sees in Maine. And so on.

This was true long before the Internet. Imagine the ability to instantaneously share information about clients now!

Keene goes into other tricks of the trade, most of them fairly basic sleight-of-hand and mentalist stuff. Chiffon turns out to be the fabric of choice for ectoplasm in a darkened room, for instance, as it looks remarkably smoke-like when the right lighting is used. Other basic mentalist skills such as pick-pocketing, palming, cold reading, and ventriloquism also fill the medium's arsenal.

There's a real sadness to many of the stories Keene tells, as people are defrauded of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars by a spiritualist network from which Keene can glean no stories of 'real' psychics...or even people who believe they're real psychics. The entire enterprise seems corrupt, and seems to have been corrupt since the birth of modern spiritualism in America in the mid-19th century.

Along the way, Keene also coins a useful term -- 'true-believer syndrome.' He applies it to the customers (or dupes, or rubes) who continue to believe that they've experienced real spiritual phenomena even when, in some cases, the medium himself or herself comes clean and admits to that person that everything was a fraud. I think you can imagine how this phenomenon plays out again and again in areas other than spiritualism. A fascinating book about a fascinating (and disturbing) topic. Recommended.