If This Was America They'd Call Them the Sammies

The UK's Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, which is becoming one of my favorite prizes thanks to its eclectic and interesting choices, was awarded last night to Kate Summerscale for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or, the Murder at Road Hill House. It slipped past my radar when it was published here (with a different subtitle, as The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective) in April by Walker & Co., but the judges' remarks make it sound fairly delicious:

The judges were unanimous: this is one of those great non-fiction books that uses the techniques of fiction to magnificent effect. On first reading, it is an absolute page-turner. Then, when you reread it, you realise how many levels it has, how much it tells you - about the founding of the police, the Victorian study of physiognomy, the inherent snobbery of the time that meant that the police wouldn't touch anyone from the upper classes, because they 'couldn't' have committed a crime.

PW loved it too ("a mesmerizing portrait") and there are some well-written 5-star customer reviews featured on our page too. The books on the shortlist it beat out were very strong--The Guardian's literary editor, Claire Armitstead, one of the judges, wrote about them all (without tipping her hand) just before the winner was announced. Here are the other contenders, which range all over the nonfiction map:

• Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (out here in October)
• Crow Country by Mark Crocker (not published in the US yet)
• The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes
• The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
• The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross

There's a lot of apples vs. oranges here, but that's the fun of it--I'd love to see a big US nonfiction prize that lumped history, biography, criticism, current events, etc., all together in one cage match like this. --Tom