Salmagundi #7

Steampunk music? Hmm. Take a listen.

Times reporter Hannah Betts (left) plays Victorian housemaid for 24 hours under the supervision of English Heritage and lives (barely) to tell the tale.

Robert Downey Jr. will play Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's upcoming film of the same name. Reportedly inspired as much by Lionel Wigram's comic book as by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic stories, the film will begin shooting this October for a scheduled 2010 release.

The story of a murder case that gripped Victorian England has won Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder at Road Hill House tells the story of an 1860 child murder that tested the mettle of one of Scotland Yard's first detectives and inspired writers including Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Francis Saville Kent, the three-year-old son of a factory inspector, was stabbed in the chest and had his throat slashed. His body was found in a toilet at the family's country house. With jealous half-siblings, a dead mother who had gone mad, a cruel governess turned stepmother and a staff of gardeners, stable-hands, and servants in the mix, the crime scandalised Victorian society. Theories about the killing were debated at dinner parties and the murder fuelled the 1860s phenomenon of the "sensation" novel. Detective Inspector Jack Whicher, one of the original eight Scotland Yard detectives, was put in charge of the case and concluded that the murder was an inside job. Whicher was 45, shabby and grizzled, and the country went wild for him, but the case left him a broken man.