Highly Suspicious

Today The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction. This, I'm excited about, and I don't honest think at any point in my life I'd ever though I'd get excited about a book prize of any description. Such is the way life panned out for me, I'm in the book trade, all be it on one of the lower rungs in that my life basically revolves around flogging copies of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher to Daily Mail readers. But book prizes are different to film awards like The Oscars, when you've either seen all the films, or (with the exception of the documentary shorts and other pointless drivel) know what they're about anyway, so you're always rooting for the one you like most, or with music awards where you've heard all the nominees far too much already and are obliged to disagree and find fault even if your own band wins because it's all such a farce and all The Man anyway. No, book prizes are interesting above those because they're baffling and weird.

The Samuel Johnson Prize is an international, but British based prize awarded to what's regarded by the panel (Rosie Boycott and some other hacks) as being the best Non Fiction book of the last year (May 2007 - May 2008). First baffling point is that more than quite a few non fiction books get published a year, even working in a book store that mainly appeals to mainstreams tastes, I can see we get somewhere in the region of 10-15 new non fiction titles in each delivery. Nobody could ever dream to read all of them, especially since the average history hardback are mega-reads you can't even pick up with one hand, so picking the best is really the case of rooting through best seller charts, well received press reviews, and people swanking over gourmet dinners telling you what they're chewing over on the tube. Hardly fair, and also explains why the shortlist for the prize are comprised of precisely the above. Patrick French's biography of Booker winner VS Naipaul may have sold fuck all copies, but was reviewed to buggery. Tim Butcher's Blood River was a Richard and Judy book club book, and thus in the public eye for the past seven months. The others were all bigged up by the broadsheets. So although almost all the books are by all accounts interesting, I doubt many people have actually bothered to read them though, so at least having their names bandied around a bit more than upon publication might perform some tricks.

However, and this is rare for me, especially with the fiction prizes like the Booker and the Orange awards, I'd actually read one of the books. I'd actually read one-and-a-half, but found The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross too much and never got past chapter three in the time I had it. So by default, I found myself rooting for a book tonight, and was excited it won. I read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale in April, about two weeks after it got published and received the inaugeral and often kiss-of-death accolade of History Book of the Month at work, but it sounded promising, a country house murder mystery yarn, complete with bonkers family and chin-stroking master detective summoned to solve the crime and sod off back to London. Very Cluedo, with a bit of 19th century true crime thrown in too. I read it on the train journey to and from Winchester when I went home for dad's 60th birthday. The Road Hill House, where the murder takes place in the book, is in Trowbridge, which is on the train route from Cardiff to London, and I found myself at the end of each chapter or paragraph gazing wistfully out of the window to look at the largely unchanged countryside to see which side of the train the house might have been resting on. I didn't even know if the house was still built, but it was a fantastic book to read hurtling through the Somerset and Wiltshire countryside. It is an extremely well-written book, that pitches itself the middle ground between true crime thriller, and historical melodrama based on life in the 1860s, neither of which have much appeal to me on their own, but together, they're lethal. Obviously then at my dad's birthday celebrations in between scoffing schloer and sausage rolls, I told pretty much everyone there to read the book, and even paraded it around at one point to ensure everyone remembered the fake sepia-tinged beige cover and investigate at a later date. I'm pretty sure they didn't, but the intent was there, and although the Samuel Johnson Prize is hardly The Brit Awards or Andy Murray, I hope if any of them hear Kate Summerscale's name on the Today show or wherever, they'll remember my good intentions and the brief speck on the radar of my life, when I was a literary critic.