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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Child sleuth takes on old-fashioned puzzler

Reviewed by: Corey Redekop

Posted: 03/13/2010 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

By Alan Bradley

Doubleday Canada, 272 pages, $30

IF one were to follow the tenets of Agatha Christie mysteries, one would stay far away from quaint English townships.

Late-blooming Canadian mystery writer Alan Bradley knows the drill. His fictional British town, Bishop's Lacey, has a huge proportion of strange criminal conundrums for such a tiny municipality.

It is also blessed, like Christie's books, with a detective of unusual cunning and resourcefulness. Flavia de Luce is an eccentric with a penchant for amateur sleuthing.

The 70ish Bradley, who spent many years in Saskatchewan and now lives in Malta, revels in her peculiarities.

Introduced in 2009's surprise hit The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Flavia is a self-possessed 11-year-old with a fondness for chemistry and a yearning to make sense of her world, and in Bradley's hands she is the spiritual love child of Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple.

At the start of this second de Luce mystery, Flavia finds herself still living in a large old house with her two detestable sisters and her philatelist father.

Flavia is proceeding with her investigations into chemistry, already "making notes for a definitive work [called] De Luce on Decomposition, in which I would outline, step by step, the process of human cadaveric decay."

When Flavia happens upon an enigmatic woman weeping in a graveyard, she takes it upon herself to intervene. The young snoop quickly finds herself caught up in a mystery involving marionettes, the past death of a local child, and one decidedly dead BBC children's personality.

Flavia is a strikingly enjoyable heroine, precocious, preternaturally intelligent to a fault, and not giving "a frog's fundament" for anyone who crosses her.

Her intellect crosses the border into the implausible, but such a leap is far easier with such an engaging narrator, at ease with explaining the mechanics of human decay as she is espousing that Beethoven, while "a very great musician, and a wizard composer of symphonies... was quite often a dismal failure when it came to ending them."

As in classic Christie novels, the mystery forms only half of the narrative. The other half is the town itself and its many varied characters, and Bradley heaps scads of idiosyncratic personalities with such glorious monikers as "Mad Meg," "Dogger," and "Mutt Wilmott" into an already convoluted plotline.

If there is any real shortcoming here, it is that Flavia shows precious little growth as a character from the debut novel. While continuity of character is another staple of such anachronistic entertainments (did Miss Marple ever evolve beyond her knitting and gardening pursuits?), one hopes that the few glimpses allowed into Flavia's past, especially concerning her long-deceased mother Harriet, will eventually allow her some avenue into maturity in further stories.

Otherwise, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag offers a surfeit of pleasures, an old-fashioned puzzler of red herrings, left turns and sharp twists. It should easily please Bradley's fans, and newcomers will find themselves happily falling for Flavia's exploits.

Corey Redekop is a Manitoba-born librarian and author.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 13, 2010 H9

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