'Dazzling mix of reportage and literary thriller' from Kate Summerscale

A former obituary writer – a job that piqued her interest in the lives of others – and literary editor, Summerscale unearthed The Wicked Boy case when fossicking among digitised old newspapers in search of something that might spark her interest.

She is the bestselling author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, a meticulously researched, gracefully written, suspenseful account of a Victorian country house murder, and the creator of a literary genre – true crime that reads like a psychological detective novel. The book won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction in 2008 and was dramatised for television. (In 1997, her first book, The Queen of Whale Cay, about a cross-dressing lesbian millionairess, won a Somerset Maugham award.)

We have therefore come to expect “something Victorian and dark” from Summerscale, whose last book, the Edinburgh-set Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (2012), told of a scandalous divorce.

The Wicked Boy does not disappoint. It begins early on a Monday morning in the hot summer of 1895 as Robert and his 12-year-old brother Nattie set out from the family’s small, terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord’s. They were home alone, they told neighbours, because their father had gone to sea the previous Friday and their mother was visiting family in Liverpool.

Over 10 days the boys went on a spending spree, pawning their parents’ valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. Then, in the fierce July heat, an awful smell began to emanate from the yellow-brick house in Cave Road, Plaistow. In a bedroom upstairs the badly decomposed, slaughtered body of their mother was discovered.

Robert and Nattie were sent for trial to the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to stabbing his mother and appeared to show no remorse – his lawyers argued insanity. The charge against Nattie was dropped; he gave evidence against his brother. Robert was sentenced to indefinite detention in Broadmoor, the fortified criminal lunatic asylum that housed England's most notorious killers, and where he was the youngest inmate. He was there for 17 years.

Even by Summerscale’s immaculately detailed narrative standards, this is an extraordinary investigation of the actuality of murder. In a dazzling mix of reportage and literary thriller, she investigates this apparently motiveless, rare act of matricide, of which the Stratford Express, reported: “In the wildest dreams of fiction, nothing has ever been depicted which equals the loathsomeness of this story,” (20 July 1895).

“When I first read about it, I was just browsing but the case immediately intrigued me – two boys accused of killing their mother. It felt eerie and compelling, almost dreamlike the way they had spent the 10 days before their mother’s body was found,” she says. “They seemed to have done it together but then one gave evidence against the other. It was such a rich, dark story. At first, what I found in the newspapers and Old Bailey transcripts seemed to be it; I thought I had done all the reading that there was.”

The story stayed with her. “I went back and searched all the local newspapers and the National Archives, where I found a file on the case, with transcripts of witness statements. I wanted to discover what happened to these boys after the trial, which I thought would be fascinating in itself. I hoped it might throw some light on why their mother had been killed.

“I really went after them – especially Robert, because I enjoy the research. I found an image of his gravestone in Australia. I hadn’t even known that he had gone to Broadmoor, let alone Australia! On his tombstone it said that he had served in the First World War and it named his battalion – and there were the words, "Always remembered by Harry Mulville & family".

Here was this Victorian story about someone who had committed a murder, been in an asylum, then here he was serving in the Great War. I knew that I could find out what happened to him in the war – and I had Harry Mulville’s name. I got very caught up in it. Always, I had felt there was something more to Robert and his story, that something must have been very wrong in that household.”

She went to Australia and researched Robert’s war record. “He saved lives,” she says softly. She also tracked down the Mulville family and met Harry (95), who has since died. He had met Robert, in 1930, as a troubled 11-year-old.

I tell Summerscale that I hope that no reviewers give away the surprising ending of the story. “I work hard and very carefully because I want to surprise the reader. I think reviewers don’t worry about spoilers in non-fiction the way they do with fiction, so I hope they don’t spoil it," she responds.

In her previous books, Summerscale has drawn on literature of the time – Mr Whicher is steeped in references to novels, such as Bleak House and The Moonstone, while the discovery of Mrs Robinson’s sensational diary echoes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and – most tellingly – Madame Bovary. For The Wicked Boy, she immersed herself in another kind of literature: Victorian penny dreadfuls, cheap shockers sold on bookstalls.

Robert had a collection of them and the coroner at the inquest warned that such “inflammable and shocking literature... leads to many dreadful crimes.”

“That was such a big part of my research,” explains Summerscale, who has a 14-year-old son. “It was difficult because the penny dreadfuls are not catalogued or online. It was the most detective work I did, I tried to find all those mentioned during the trial. It was fun tracking them down; I found about half of them. It was wonderful to be able to read material that Robert had read and which the press at the time held responsible for the murder. There was a real moral panic afterwards, that these publications were giving young, working-class boys ideas. Some ‘dreadfuls’ were quite disturbing, incredibly racist and violent towards women, but mostly they are silly adventures. Robert Louis Stevenson read them as a boy – he said they were his best reading experience.”

The daughter of a diplomat, Summerscale was raised in Japan and Chile before being educated at Bedales boarding school, in Hampshire, Oxford University and Stanford, California. Her own reading experiences as a child led to the belief that “writing novels would be the best thing ever to do.”

Will she write that novel? “I think I have found something that approximates to the novel with my non-fiction. It’s the best of both worlds, although I’d thought I wouldn’t write another Victorian story. But they are so strange and different. I recognise them; I feel I know what it was like to live in Victorian London, although this story spills into the 20th century. I had no idea that there would be people alive who had known the murderer.

“You feel history has bumped into you, that it’s real, that these people lived and died, that terrible things were done – good things, too.”

The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury, £16.99).