
Behind the books
My ghost hunt
by Kate Summerscale, Daily Telegraph (£)
'I discovered, to my delight, that one folder was Fodor’s dossier on Alma. Here were transcripts of her seances and of his interviews with her, lab reports, X-rays, copies of her contracts, notes, sketches, word association tests, and evidence of materialisations.'
The housewife and the poltergeist
by Kate Summerscale, The Guardian
In an ordinary terrace in Croydon, declared the Sunday Pictorial, 'some malevolent, ghostly force is working miracles. Poltergeist … That’s what the scientists call it. The Spiritualists? They say it’s all caused by a mischievous earth-bound spirit.'
Blood brothers
by Kate Summerscale, The Wicked Boy, Bloomsbury
‘In early July 1895, during one of the hottest, driest summers in living memory, Robert and Nathaniel Coombes were seen roaming the streets and parks of East London. Robert, 13, had packed in his job at a local shipyard. Nattie, 12, was bunking off school.’
Five chronicles of crime
by Kate Summerscale, Waterstones blog
‘The best true-crime books tell urgent, intimate stories that also cast light on a wider world. When a murder is investigated, whether by a detective or a writer, the private is made public, something hidden is revealed, secrets are exposed.’

On writing Mr Whicher
by Kate Summerscale, The Guardian
‘If Whicher helped me to write my book, he also helped me to finish it. When I reread his reports to Scotland Yard, I realised that the whole of his theory about the killing had not been made public. To conclude the story, and satisfy my detective fever, I made even his suspicions my own.’

Madame Bovary & Eleanor Marx
by Kate Summerscale, Financial Times (£)
‘As a woman in late 19th-century London and the daughter of a radical thinker, Eleanor Marx had freedoms of which a provincial wife such as Madame Bovary could barely dream. But she recognised Flaubert’s heroine, and she felt for her. The depth of her identification became clear only upon her death.’
Mr Whicher on TV
by Sally Williams, Daily Telegraph (£)
‘On day two we realised we’d gone wrong on Whicher’s room, when he is in a state of nervous breakdown,’ the director explains. ‘Instead of looking like a distressed detective, he looked like a romantic poet with writer’s block. So, we reshot it. We dirtied down the walls and gave him an 1860s equivalent of pizza boxes and cans of Stella.’

I wish I’d written
by Kate Summerscale, The Independent
‘I came across Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier when I was in my teens, in a box of my grandmother's books. I was gripped but baffled by the story. Afterwards, I remembered only its mysterious, confused atmosphere, passionate, messed-up, blurred.’

The invention of Cluedo
by Kate Summerscale, The Guardian
‘The detective novel on which Cluedo seems to have drawn most directly was Agatha Christie’s The Body In The Library, published in 1942, which opens with Colonel and Mrs Bantry of Gossington Hall discovering in their dusty library the corpse of a young, platinum-blond dancer called Ruby Keene.’

The afterlife of a murder
by Kate Summerscale, The Guardian
‘In the years that followed the murder, the story of Road Hill went underground, leaving the pages of the press to reappear in the pages of fiction. It shaped the first detective novel and the early psychological thrillers. Jack Whicher was transformed into the archetypal detective hero — and into his double, the spy.’