Quotes from Kate Summerscale

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.

Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?" (Editorial, The Times , 22 July 1853)

The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.

fifteen-year-old from Shepherd's Bush, West London, who had poisoned himself with carbolic acid. His father had given him a 'good hiding', the paper reported, because he had been out of work for a month. The boy left a note reading 'I wish you to know the reason I did it is because I could not work', but the judge none the less ascribed his death to his consumption of 'literary offal'.

looking round him wildly. The boys were calm and said nothing.

In every other age and class man is held responsible for his reading, and not reading responsible for man. The books a man or woman reads are less the making of character than the expression of it.

I think people marry far too much, it is such a lottery after all, and to a poor woman very doubtful happiness.

Like Frankenstein, I am afraid of the monster I have called into existence.

Joe said of herself: 'I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer.

and Thomas Anstey Guthrie's Vice Versa: a Lesson to Fathers, a novel of 1882 about a schoolboy and his father, a City merchant, who exchange bodies and inhabit each others' lives. The boy's father is taught how trapped a lively-minded boy can feel when he has 'no money and few rights', 'virtually no way to assert himself in the world around him'.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.

There is so much bias for self-love, so much recklessness about truth in general, and so much of even a sincere faithlessness of narration, that no partial account of anything is to be trusted.

the medical journal The Lancet explained the process by which the dreadfuls could foster violence. People of a lower evolutionary type, the journal said, had an ape-like tendency to imitation. If exposed to stories of suicide or murder, degenerate individuals might be impelled to act them out.