Let’s start off with the fact that I love mysteries about stamp collecting, and in fact, collect any fictional work that involves the hobby or postal matters as its main subject. So, I was very excited to learn that Alan Bradley’s THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE involves a stamp-related murder.
And I was overjoyed to meet his precocious protagonist, 11-year-old Flavia de Luce. Remarkably, Bradley writes very well in first-person as the de Luce girl, and while she is certainly a remarkable prodigy in chemistry and science, there is an air of childish reality about her as well that is pleasing.
One day, the de Luce family discover a dead bird on its porch, with its bill piercing a Penny Black, the world’s first postage stamp, printed by Great Britain in 1840. Flavia’s father is a stamp collector, but the horror that he displays seems overblown if he is just reacting to stamp desecration. But he is not; he knows it’s a warning. And soon, Flavia discovers a strange man literally dying with his last breath in the garden. From here, the tale gets very involved indeed, as Flavia’s father is charged with murdering the man, and Flavia investigates in order to clear his name.
The early investigatory antics of the girl are the real jewel here, and the book soars when she is at the center of the action. But the middle of the novel is taken up by a long and rambling account by Flavia’s father of his school days and how those are what lie behind the crime. This secondhand flashback is awkward and separates the reader from the book’s natural flow. It’s almost as if this part was written first for a different book, and then it was incorporated and reconstituted with the presence of Flavia. Anyway, after this section, Flavia turns once again into the detective and nimbly solves the crime, although at great danger to herself.
One other drawback is the strange convolutions of some of the plot devices. An example will suffice. Jack snipes are not found in England at the time when the dead one shows up on the de Luce’s doorsteps. It turns out that a jack snipe is used because the nickname of Flavia’s father is Jacko. The person who issues the warning had to smuggle a dead jack snipe in a pie(!) from Norway to England, just for the sake of the warning. Not to mention he then has to find a very particular plate variety of the not-necessarily-cheap Penny Black and ruin it permanently. Really, a call would have done.
But perhaps some of that fantastical twistiness is what appeals to the Crime Writers’ Association as it gave its Debut Dagger Award to Bradley for this novel. It is a good mystery with strong detection and a marvelous central character. The overall plot is believable, but it’s some of the details in the development that tend to rub the wrong way,such as the father not voicing his suspicions 30 years ago when the stamp at the center of this entire affair is supposedly destroyed.
There is room for improvement, and it is to be hoped that Bradley does so in his second Flavia de Luce novel, which he is working on now. —Mark Rose
Related posts:
- The Trafficked
- The Berlin Conspiracy
- The Intruders
- The Last Jew Standing
- BULLETS, BROADS, BLACKMAIL & BOMBS >> Full House: Queens over Jacks
