As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

The seventh title in Alan Bradley’s series of historical mysteries featuring Flavia de Luce. Each mystery can be read in series order or as a standalone novel.

Flavia’s world is turned upside down when she is banished to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Canada – her mother Harriet’s old boarding school. With its forbidding headmistress, intimidating teachers and bizarre rules, adapting to Miss Bodycote’s could be a matter of life and death.

But Flavia is soon on familiar ground when she is presented with a gruesome puzzle to solve. And the mystery of a withered corpse is only the beginning. Girls have been disappearing from Miss Bodycote’s, leading Flavia to wonder what exactly the academy’s true purpose is.

Reviewed by Andy Merrills in Slightly Foxed Issue 55.

Not So Cosy After All?

ANDY MERRILLS

Raymond Chandler was not a great fan of the ‘cosy’ crime novel. In a famous essay of 1950 called ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, the novelist satirized the intricate, ingenious and implausible plots of the great English detective writers and scoffed at their emphasis upon the perfect puzzle, rather than the reality of human action. Not for him solutions that hinged on the potting of prize-winning begonias or the carefully calibrated murder with a platinum stiletto. In his view, crime writing only really came of age with Dashiell Hammett and the fast-talking, hard-punching heroes of a new American tradition, of which Chandler himself is perhaps now the best-known exponent. In view of this, I sometimes wonder what Raymond Chandler would have made of Alan Bradley and his pugnacious heroine Flavia de Luce.

On the face of it, crimes don’t get much cosier than those which appear in the first six novels of the Flavia sequence. The convention of Slightly Foxed dictates that titles are normally tucked away in a footnote, but I think it is worth savouring the delightful cadence of all six here: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie; The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag; A Red Herring without Mustard; I Am Half-Sick of Shadows; Speaking from among the Bones and The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. To me, each of these seems to have exactly the right balance of whimsy and menace, and these are promises that are admirably fulfilled in the books that follow . . .