Unfortunately, the one person to whom his personal debt is so large that he could require anything of Janson is calling in his marker. The spy game ended up costing him everything that was most important to him and it would take a lot to lure him back into it. Paul Janson is a retired operative, now a highly sought-after and extremely selective security specialist. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it author Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today: from the cryptic Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable – that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.
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