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THE WICKED BOY
by Kate Summerscale
Penguin Random House, July 2016
400 pages
$28.00
ISBN: 1594205787


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Kate Summerscale has carved out an enviable niche for herself as chronicler of Victorian crime, especially as it relates to the young. Her best-selling THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER dealt with the emergence of the detective as a figure licensed to pry into a middle-class Victorian household as well as with the murder of a three-year-old child by his adolescent half-sister. In the present book, Summerscale moves forward about forty years in time, to London and the shocking case of the thirteen-year-old lad who killed his mother and left her body to the maggots in the bedroom they once had shared. In both books, Summerscale's attention is far less on the lurid details of an unusual murder than on the conveying in rich detail the social context in which the crime occurred.

In July of 1895, Robert Coombes stabbed his mother to death in her bedroom in East London. He then covered her up and locked the bedroom door. He and his younger brother Nattie then proceeded on a kind of pre-adolescent round of pleasure, going twice to Lord's for the cricket, eating the foods they both loved, and playing cards with John Fox, a not-too-bright seaman friend of the family whom Robert had invited to stay as a kind of cover for the absence of a responsible adult. Their father was away at sea.

Fox, who evidently knew nothing about what was festering in the bedroom, was content to accept the story of Mrs Coombes' absence in Liverpool. He was also apparently gifted with a insensitivity to odours, as he noticed nothing at all, until the bedroom door was finally breached under the urging of the boys' aunt and the complaints of neighbours.

There is no question of Robert's guilt - he definitely did it. Fox appears to have been slow-witted and accepting. Twelve-year-old Nattie is somewhat more problematic. He certainly knew what Robert had planned, but gave evidence against him at trial in return for not being charged. But the why of it is a bit more of a puzzle. Summerscale does not indulge in the kind of psychological speculation that is the stock in trade of a certain kind of true crime investigation. She is far more interested (and so was I) in what the public made of the whole affair.

What she describes is surprisingly familiar to the contemporary reader. In an attempt to explain how Robert could have done the deed and behaved with such aplomb afterward, the press turned first to the "penny dreadfuls," which comprised the bulk of his reading. In 1950 or so, it would have been the lurid horror comics that so distressed Frederic Werthem. Later on it would have been rock music, today, video games to account for a shocking decline in the morality of the young. To the late Victorians' credit, however, this explanation was finally dismissed, to be replaced with a "death of civilization" sort of lament, coupled with a notion of the degeneration of the young in a cities, a counter-evolutionary development that recommended that youths like Robert be "put down" for the good of the race.

Happily he wasn't. He was deemed insane and sent off to Broadmoor to serve at Her Majesty's pleasure. Curiously, despite the shudders that the very name of Broadmoor evoked at the time, this turned out to be a lucky turn for Robert. He was a clever lad and being so young, it was decided that he should be put in the wing that housed the better class of the criminally insane. He learned to speak with a proper accent, had music lessons, and played cricket on Broadmoor's First XI. He learned a useful trade and was finally released. He emigrated to Australia and acquitted himself well as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli. In an affecting coda to the book Summerscale pursues him to Australia and his apparent redemption.

There's a great deal more of interest here. Any aspiring writer of historical fiction would be advised to take a close look at this book to see how even in a work of non-fiction, Summerscale sustains narrative tension and avoids the dreaded information dump that can sink the forward motion of any story. The author respects the reader to the point that she refrains from any definitive judgement on Robert, his motives, his sanity, or his evil. She leaves that to her readers to decide and therefore THE WICKED BOY would make a meaty bone to gnaw on for any book discussion group.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2016

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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