TRUE CRIME:AGATHA CHRISTIE'S play, The Mousetrap, opened in London's West End in 1952. Fifty-six years and 23,000 performances later, business each night in St Martin's Theatre is as brisk as ever for the famous play whose ending is kept secret by those who have seen it.
The Mousetrap takes place in a country house setting - a crime scene environment that many are familiar with from detective fiction and from such board games as Cluedo, where the game is set in a mansion, with the board divided into different rooms. The story of The Mousetrap is of a young couple who have started a new hotel in a converted country manor. They are snowed in together with four guests and an additional traveller, who ran his car into a snowdrift. A police inspector arrives on skis to inform the group that he believes a murderer is on his way to the hotel, following a murder in London.
However, when one of the guests is killed, they realise the murderer is already there. It quickly transpires that the killer could be anyone of the hotel guests, or even the hosts themselves. What, half a century earlier, Henry James had described as "the terrors of the cheerful country house" are all present and correct.
The genesis of The Mousetrap - itself descended from decades of Victorian "sensation" novels and the detective mysteries that followed them - and of the ever-popular country house murder genre can be found in a true case in Wiltshire in 1860, as Kate Summerscale recounts in her excellent book. On June 29th, 1860, the Kent family retired for the night behind the shuttered windows of their detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire. Asleep in the house were 12 people, including three servants. The next morning the family awoke to find that a horrific murder had taken place during the night. A fortnight later, following the bungling of the investigation by local police, detective Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard was dispatched to solve the case. The eyes of the country were on him.
The murder at Road Hill House took place at the dawn of both modern crime detection and modern crime fiction, a confluence that Summerscale describes with light-handed ease:
A detective was a recent invention. The first fictional sleuth, Auguste Dupin, appeared in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the rue Morgue in 1841, and the first real detectives in the English-speaking world were appointed by the London Metropolitan Police the next year.
"Intelligent men have recently been selected to form a body called the 'detective police'," reported Chambers' Edinburgh Journal in 1843. "At times the detective policeman attires himself in the dress of ordinary individuals."
The newspapers and the public were generally sniffy, regarding these new policemen as little better than jumped-up spies from the lower classes.
Whicher arrived in Road and proceeded to examine the circumstances surrounding the murder with the detached logic, keen observation and bloodhound-like intuition that would go on to inform the working habits of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and a thousand other fictional sleuths.
In Road Hill House, a seemingly respectable Victorian middle-class home, Whicher found insanity, jealousy, rebellious children, scheming servants, loathing and loneliness. It was the setting of the classic murder mystery and was given its first fictional outing by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone (1868). "Everyone [in the country house mystery] seems guilty because everyone has something to hide," Summerscale says. "This is the trick on which detective fiction turns."
Summerscale, who this year won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for her book, writes of the Road Hill House tragedy with a Hardy-esque sense of the English countryside. The murder was committed in high summer, as the hay was brought in down narrow lanes "banked high with brambles, grasses and nettles, and flecked with white hogweed flowers."
Peering in over the wall of Road Hill House were the suspicious villagers - blacksmiths, harness-makers, shoemakers, washerwomen, bakers and parish constables. From this idyllic nucleus, the crime that begged for justice seeped out until hysteria gripped the land. Everyone had a view on who the culprit was. The local police entered "a compact of secrecy" to protect their own ineptitude.
Summerscale draws together the story of the first English detectives, the story of how detective fiction unfolded and the story of a gruesome Victorian murder in an artfully woven and unflagging narrative. As Jack Whicher comes to life in this book, so the prototype of the detective in fiction emerges: unmarried, a loner, troubled by his conscience, bedevilled by his superiors and by the jealous local officials he must put up with. He often works in a "roundabout" way that makes others think him stupid and ineffective - think Peter Falk's bumbling TV detective, Colombo - and thus throws the guilty off their guard.
Like all good detective stories, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher ends in a delicious twist. "Nothing in the world is hidden forever," wrote Wilkie Collins. "The lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never seen."
Peter Cunningham's new novel, The Sea and the Silence, will be published in September by New Island Books
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House By Kate Summerscale Bloomsbury, 360pp. £14.99