Kate Summerscale wins literary prize for real life Victorian thriller

Kate Summerscale (pictured between Rosie Boycott, right, and Kirsty Wark), a former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, has won the prestigious £30,000 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction for her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: or the Murder at Road Hill, beating Patrick French’s recent biography of V S Naipaul, which had been the bookies’ favourite. The Jack Whicher of the title was the name of the Scotland Yard detective called in to investigate the horrific killing of a three-year-old boy, Saville Kent, who was snatched from his bed in June 1860. He was found in the garden of the family home the next morning, his throat slit.

The crime became known as the Road Hill House murder and inspired a generation of writers, among them Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens, and a succession of fictional sleuths can be traced back to Whicher. One critic described the book as "an unexpectedly moving thriller that is difficult to put down", serving as an acute and forensic study of the birth of the modern detective.

Summerscale is no stranger to literary prizes. Her first book, a biography of a 1920s lesbian speedboat racer who fell in love with a leather doll, won her the 1998 Somerset Maugham prize.