Kate Summerscale Meet the Author

Kate Summerscale is at home with crime.

The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher unravelled a true Victorian

mystery with meticulous and atmospheric relish,

and in The Wicked Boy, she's back on that same fertile ground,

on the trail of a terrible murder in the East End of London.

It was matricide.

The story takes us from the East End to the Old Bailey to the dark

confinement of Broadmoor, and eventually to the colonies.

The story ends in Australia.

It's a dark and violent story, but one that has heroism

and redemption at its heart, too.

Welcome.

Tell us how you came across the story.

What led you on the trail into this very dark mystery or happening?

I came across the story in an old newspaper.

There was a report of these two boys, aged 12 and 13,

who had been found living in a house in east London with the corpse

of their murdered mother.

And one of the boys immediately confessed to having committed

the crime, and both were arrested and charged with murder.

What is interesting is you were able to discover quite a lot

about the story relatively easily, and begin to piece it together.

The newspaper coverage at that time, 1895, was really fantastic,

so in the local press, the East London press

but also the national press, this story was covered in detail

with a lot of colour, and with images, courtroom sketches

of the boys, pictures of the house.

Those were the days!

You wouldn't get it now.

No.

So there was instantly, as soon as I had decided to look

into the story and started researching, a lot of detail

about the events of that summer, and the trial of the brothers.

When people come to read the book, the account of the trial is,

apart from being dramatic as all these things

are because the stakes are so high, really quite shocking.

Robert Coombes, the older of the two brothers, the 13-year-old,

his lawyers were pleading that he was insane at the time

of the crime, and the judge was really having none of it,

and tried very hard to steer the jury towards

a straightforward guilty verdict.

But one way and another, they resisted, so for as much

as the judge was a stereotype of the harsh Victorian morality,

the jury showed something different, which was a capacity for mercy.

One of the things that emerges in the public

debate that was reflected in all the newspaper coverage that

you spoke of was the influence of the so-called Penny Dreadful,

the supposed influence.

These rather shocking adventure stories, as many people

thought they were.

Tell us how big their influence was at that time,

and what the debate around them was.

As soon as the boys were arrested, the police collected evidence

from the house, and among the evidence they collected

was a pile of Penny Dreadfuls, sensational comic story books

for boys, and the inquest jury seized on this,

because it was a huge moral panic at the time,

the effect of the Penny Dreadfuls on the youth of Britain.

Rather like the video game today, people said, they watch these things

and they go out and do the same thing.

Just so.

They were modelling their behaviour on the criminals and the violence

that they found in these books, that was the assumption.

What are your reflections, having looked at the case of these

boys who were ending up at the Old Bailey,

off to Broadmoor?

It is a terrible story of cataclysmic

disruption to their lives.

Morally, do you think they were treated in a way

that we would now approve of?

Was it fair?

I think it was very strange to try children at that age,

and they were considered children even by Victorian standards,

and the older boy, even, had only just left school,

the younger boy was still at school.

Very strange to try them as if they were adults,

but of course we still do now, and in fact, I was surprised

by the fact that the jury showed a certain tenderness

and pity towards the...

It is an interesting aspect of the story, isn't it?

They didn't behave according to type as it is often presented.

No, and within my own lifetime I have been aware of the public

reacting to juvenile, horrific juvenile crimes, murders,

with a lot more rage and loathing towards the perpetrators

than was certainly the case with the jury in this,

so in that sense, there was a certain merciful,

forgiving aspect to it, and also, in what actually

went on at Broadmoor.

You would think a 13-year-old boy being sent to Broadmoor,

and he was by some stretch the youngest patient there,

would be a thing of horror, but in fact he was treated

with extreme kindness, as were most of the inmates there.

One of the things you have done in the book is to paint a very vivid

picture of the world of London, East London

particularly at the time.

This was the London of Sherlock Holmes, it was the London

of Jack the Ripper.

To try to understand why these boys committed the crime,

I need to understand exactly what their days were like,

what they were surrounded by, what their ideas about having fun

were, or what their futures were going to be like.

The story also has a pleasing element of redemption

at the end, or recovery, I suppose you could call it,

when he goes to Australia.

I had been gripped by the story at first, a mixture of horror

at what he and his brother had done, but also a sense of pity

for what they had done to themselves as well as to their mother,

and mystification about why, and what could possibly become of them.

It was rather wonderful to discover that he was discharged at the age

of 30 after 17 years in Broadmoor, and was able to serve

in the First World War, to distinguish himself as a soldier.

With acts of kindness?

With acts of kindness.

He was a stretcher bearer at Gallipoli, so although he served

nobly, he didn't fight.

He had non-combat roles, as a stretcher bearer and also

as a band leader.

You clearly find it frankly exciting to discover a letter

in the National Archives at Kew or, as you did, to talk in Australia

to someone who had actually shaken hands and actually much more that,

shaken hands with one of the boys.

Once the book had been commissioned, I had no idea that there was this

sort of final act to the boy's life, and that there was a person,

I discovered, still living, who had known him, to whom he,

the boy who had killed his mother, had done good to this man

still living, had really changed his life.

But the living person did not know about the crime in the boy's

childhood, and so I was confronted with this situation where the past

that I was researching had come hurtling into the present,

and had the capacity to affect lives now.

Kate Summerscale, thank you very much.

Thanks.

Good