the Love-Child of Harriet the Spy and Sherlock Holmes: meet Flavia!

When seventy-something new author Alan Bradley sat down to write a mystery, he never expected eleven year old Flavia de Luce to become the main character. Bradley confessed that he was writing a wholly different novel, but when his detective character came to the family manor of Colonel de Luce, Flavia “hijacked” the story, entering into the plotline fully formed with her bold voice, her curiosity, her intelligence, her love for chemistry, her stubborn determination to solve a puzzle – or a murder – herself. If Flavia were none other than herself, one might feel sorry for her. She lives with her two older sisters, who torment her and with whom she shares nothing in common except their distracted, aloof father and a mother who died when Flavia was only a toddler. Critics call Flavia a combination of Harriet the Spy and Sherlock Holmes. As she and her bicycle “Gladys” journey back and forth between her family’s great house of Buckshaw and the local village of Bishop’s Lacey, Flavia digs around the dusty library archives, sneaks into the bell tower at her father’s former private school, learns more about the heretofore boring history of her father’s beloved stamp collecting, trespasses at a local inn, and delves into the secrets in her father’s background in order to absolve him of the murder of the man Flavia finds gasping his last breath in their cucumber patch at pre-dawn one early summer morning in 1950.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie was not intended to be a “young adult” novel, nor is it specifically marketed as one, but as more than one reviewer noted, this is a mystery novel without grisly descriptions of death, explicit sexual situations, or involved political plots. This book presents, at first, as a fairly simple mystery, but it has more than enough satisfying plot turns and eccentric characters to keep the pace lively and the story unique. More Agatha Christie or Nero Wolfe than Nancy Drew, this book would still be an excellent choice for younger readers with higher reading levels, so take note, parents and teachers who worry about finding books that will engage the minds of your advanced readers while not exposing your kids to ‘inappropriate’ content.

As author Alan Bradley reveals in several interviews about the Flavia books – since he has already been awarded a contract for at least four more in this series – what makes the character of Flavia work so well as a sleuth is the way that children’s curiosity is often ignored. Bradley says children are forgiven for asking hundreds of questions, for flitting about the house or the village doing whatever, and people don’t question them or fear them the way that they would if an adult were doing the same things. Therefore, adults don’t always pay attention to what they may let slip in front of children, or what a child might do with information he has seen or she has gathered. In this way, Flavia became the perfect sleuth: even when she was caught nosing around where she shouldn’t have been, most of the adults in her village underestimated her plans and her determination.

At her “tween” age and with her precociousness, Flavia makes a fascinating narrator, as she tries to gather information – like any good scientist – and make linear, logical order of the events she witnesses. It’s fun for the reader to both admire her intelligence and forgive her the mistakes she makes, balanced as she is between the magical thinking of childhood and the rational mind of the adult she is becoming.

In this first story about Flavia, Bradley weaves together several mysteries, ably brings to life period details and the verisimilitude of rural England, and resolves the central murder of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. He also teases the reader, leaving the door open for further adventures with the de Luce family, dropping hints about the circumstances of Harriet de Luce’s death nearly ten years prior, and the history that Colonel de Luce shares with his groundskeeper, “Dogger”, with whom he served during the war. Follow the intrepid Flavia and this quirky cast of characters into the next story, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, as well as the third, newly-released, A Red Herring without Mustard.

Red herring or fishy alibi? Email Hobo your thoughts at from_my_shelf@yahoo.com. Miss a clue? Check out the archives at Hobo’s blog, http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com. There’s no mystery as to why Hobo left the farm: he wanted to become a bookstore cat!