Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


“…the domestic angel of Victorian fantasy momentarily gave way to a bloodthirsty ghoul”

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Or the Murder at Road Hill House by Kate Summerscale

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Bingo: Rage Someone recommended The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher to me and, as someone who likes a good mystery and who started watching the tv show but then dropped it because of all the muttonchops, it seemed right up my alley. In theory I should love Kate Summerscale’s portrait of a middle class Victorian era family tragedy. In practice I think it could have used some editing and perhaps not every stone needed to be unturned (or turned?); however, I can be in the mood […]

Poltergeist, circa 1930

The Haunting of Alma Fielding by Kate Summerscale

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English woman Alma Fielding has had a hard life. She has had numerous health issues, is in a dull marriage and struggling financially. The world around her is in chaos, too – war with Germany seems imminent. And to add to all of her stress she seems to have attracted an at first mischievous, at times violent spirit – a poltergeist. Alma’s haunting has attracted the local newspaper, and also the attention of Hungarian emigre Nandor Fodor, a journalist turned psychic phenomena investigator. Fodor has created his […]

Another one on the meh pile

The Wicked Boy The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale

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If I’m not in a reading slump this year, I seem to be in a reviewing slump. This one hasn’t been helped by not really having much of substance to say about it almost a month after reading it, a surprise to me given how much I enjoyed what Summerscale I’d previously read (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher). The Wicked Boy takes a look at another Victorian murder case which the newspapers were fond of writing about, in which 13 year old Robert Coombes and […]

How to wind up your ‘betters’

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Do you enjoy Victorian literature? Fascinated by true crime? Then you could find a lot to enjoy in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which deals with a murder that rocked Victorian England – the death of the three year old darling of a middle class family, stolen from his crib in a locked house and found dumped in a privy with his throat cut. Calling upon the Government to send one of its newly created detectives to solve the case (and receiving the titular Mr […]

If Serial Was Set in Victorian England

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 “The ordinary was made sinister.”  Any Serial obsessed person can tell you that line pretty much sums up the whole podcast.  It also accurately sums up the murder of three year old Saville Kent in England in 1860 at Road House.  The residents and staff of Road House all had alibis that, if you believed them innocent, appeared innocuous.  If you perceived them guilty, their testimony seems suspect.  For example, when the governess awoke at 5am and noticed the three year old missing from bed, […]



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