"Just the jam and the poetry?" he said into my ear. I didn't know who he was. He approached me in the stacks as I browsed. He spoke BBC english and wore a slightly preening twisted smile. In my string bag, over my shoulder, I had a jar of cherry jam and a paperback John Donne.

- Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido


Sunday 1 May 2011

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie


Do you remember when you were a child and the summer hols rolled around  you’d escape to the country, enjoy lashings of ginger beer and maybe solve the odd mystery while having a jolly good time? I do. Sort of. I used to eat up Famous Five books, I begged my Dad to let me turn our garden shed into a clubhouse à la the Secret Seven (to no avail), I wanted to get a dog and call him Timmy, and to have a kindly relative who lived on some distant farm and who had, seemingly, not a care in the world about my comings/goings/mixing with smugglers.

Imagine my delight when I stumbled across ‘The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie’, a book which captured all the things I loved about these children’s books and moulded them into a fantastic adventure for adults. Meet 11-year-old Flavia de Luce- the most charming protagonist I’ve encountered in quite some time. She’s a precocious eccentric who mixes a love of mystery and lateral thinking with the chemistry lab of a mad scientist.

Described on the jacket as  a cross between Dodie Smith’s I Capture The Castle and the Addams Family I had high hopes of this novel and it certainly didn’t disappoint. It is easy to see the nod to Dodie Smith in the crumbling de Luce family pile, the emotionally absent father, and the deceased mother. There’s something about Flavia’s amusingly hands-on, no-nonsense attitude that will strike a chord with Cassandra fans as well. As for the Addams Family, the reference takes its cue from Flavia’s extraordinary laboratory where she indulges her true passion in life – the study of poisons. Some of my favourite moments in the book centered around Flavia’s disputes with her two older sisters (they tie her up and stuff her in a cupboard, she poisons their lipstick) Very funny.

All of this is just the background to a tightly wound murder mystery. Following her discovery of a dead man in the family cucumber patch it quickly falls to Flavia to clear her father’s name of the murder. A cast of eccentric villagers will help and hinder her in this quest, as she pedals around the 1950′s English countryside on her trusty bicycle, Gladys. All in all the overall tone of the book is one that lovingly (and in a way that is slightly tongue in cheek) returned me to those books I loved so much as a child. Definitely great armchair reading, I can’t recommend this book enough.

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