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11-year-old Miss Marple with a streak of Artemis Fowl...meet Flavia de Luce
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Meet Flavia de Luce. She's a bright 11-year-old girl living in an English country estate in the summer of 1950. Her worst problems are stuffy older sisters, an emotionally distant father, and the cook's revolting custard pies -- until a body is discovered in the cucumber patch.
Like the young criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl in the Eoin Colfer novels, Flavia has a dark side. She's into poison.
In The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Flavia drops plans to spend all her time doing chemical experiments in the well equipped lab she inherited from her mother and deceased great uncle, when she finds the body. Her determination to help the police intensifies when her father is arrested for the crime.
Think junior Miss Marple. Think female Sherlock Holmes. Think pre-pubescent Emma Peel in one of those quirky villages we came to know from The Avengers television series. Think Harriet the Spy goes to England or young Nancy Drew. Think anything you like. There's a legitimate comparison to all of these, but in the end Flavia is a delightful original.
She tells the story in first person and her point of view, age accurate and consistent, is remarkable as it's penned by a 70-year-male author in his first book.
The Crime Writers' Association gave Canadian Alan Bradley their Debut Dagger Award. Like The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen, a book about a 12-year-old genius cartographer, this is a book being marketed for adults, but ideal for some kids. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie contains no graphic violence, explicit sex, or scary threats. It's a perfect book for the smart pre-teen reader. It's more lighthearted than the usual mystery, but will give them a glimpse at how the genre is plotted; a P.G. Wodehouse pace.
The book opens with Flavia escaping from the closet where her sisters Ophelia -- Feely -- and Daphne -- Daffy -- bound and gagged her. Flavia then sereptiously administers some evil potion to Feely's lipstick. (We don't find out until the end what that was.)
Then she finds the body, notifies the gardner and the story catapults from one true Brit character to the next, mortised by more delightful imagery than one author ought to be allowed to produce:
"Feely made a grab for me and the scarf fell away to reveal a pair of red swollen lips which were the spitting image of a Cameroon Mandrill's south pole."
or,
"The floors were covered with cheap brown linoleum so pitted with gladiatorial gouges that it might have been salvaged from the Roman Colosseum."
Here's an excerpt, when Flavia confronts the maid at a hotel where one of the suspects stayed. Mary, the maid, begins:
"I was changing his sheets when he came up behind me and grabbed me. Put a hand over my mouth so's I shouldn't scream. Good job Dad called from the yard just then. Rattled him a bit, it did. Don't think I didn't get in a good kick or two. Him and his filthy paws! I'd have scratched his eye out if I'd had half the chance."
She looked at me as if she'd said too much; as if a great social gulf had suddenly opened up between us.
"I'd have scratched his eyes out and sucked out the holes," I said.
Her eyes widened in horror.
"John Marston," I told her. "The Dutch Courtesan, 1604."
There was a pause of approximately two hundred years. The Mary began to giggle.
"Ooh, you are a one!" she said.
The gap had been bridged.
"Act Two," I added.
Seconds later the two of us were doubled over, hands covering our mouths. hopping about the room, snorting in unison like a pair of trained seals."
"Feely once read it to us under the blankets with a torch," I said, and for some reason, this struck both of us as being even more hilarious, and off we went again until we were nearly paralyzed from laughter."
and another, when Flavia interviews the gardner, Dogger, in her upstairs sanctuary, the lab:
"What's the password?" I asked, linking my fingers together and placing both hands atop my head.
For about five and a half seconds Dogger looked blank, and then his tense jaw muscles relaxed slowly and he almost smiled. Like an automoton he meshed his fingers and copied my gesture.
"It's on the tip of my tongue," he said haltingly. Then, "I remember now; It's 'arsenic.'"
"Careful you don't swallow it," I replied. "It's poison."
With a remarkable display of sheer willpower, Dogger made himself smile. The ritual had been properly observed.
"Enter friend," I said, and swung the door wide.
Dogger stepted inside and looked around in wonder, as if he had suddenly found himself transported to an alchemist's lab in ancient Sumer. It had been so long since he had been in this part of the hosue that he had forgotten the room.
"So much glass," he said shakily.
I pulled out Tar's old Windsor chair from the desk, steadying it until Dogger had folded himself between its wooden arms.
"Have a sit. I'll fix you something."
I filled a clean flask with water and set it atop a wire mesh. Dogger started at the little "pop" of the Bunsen burner as I applied the match.
"Coming up," I said. "Ready in a jiff."
The fortunate thing about lab glassware is that it boils water at the speed of light. I thre a spoonful of black leaves into a beaker. When it had gone a deep red I handed it to Dogger, who stared at it skeptically.
"It's all right," I said. "It's Tetley's.
Some references in the novel will go uncaught by younger readers: accessories that would have fit in a Manderly; the two-two-one phone number that would have made Sherlock smile.... but they will not detract from their overall enjoyment of the story, the character, the humorous predicaments, exciting climax and happy denoument.
The only real problem with this novel will be -- how fast can Mr. Bradley start producing sequels?
For those interested, there is a Flavia fan club.
