The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: a novel by Alan Bradley (Find this book in our catalog)

The books I like the best are the books where I find myself relating to the main character, where for a time I find myself, as it were, inside the character's own skin. This was very true with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This is what it says in our catalog: "In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950 and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw."

Perhaps I was able to relate to Flavia because she is eleven years old in 1950, a girl trying to have adventures in a cotton frock. She is constantly getting her dress filthy and ripping the soles half off her shoes. I grew up in the fifties in England and remember painfully how hard it was to ride a bike fast and yet modestly in a dress. I thought the author's depiction of the era was right on. Flavia is feisty, brave and resourceful, and yet everything conspires against her success, including the weight and age of her bike, her distant father, and her bullying older sisters. Flavia is the classic child on her own against the world much beloved of children's authors. She is Harry Potter, she is the Little Princess, and she suffers A Series of Unfortunate Events.

And yet this is a book for adults. It will remind you of books you read as a child; and yet you will admire the sophisticated wit, the understatement and the irony. Flavia is a brilliant child and adroitly manipulates all the people she meets to her own ends. She is quite cynical and understands people's motives only too well. The reader enjoys Alan Bradley's larger-than-life and yet somehow authentic characters, especially as they are revealed by Flavia in her own snippy voice.

I liked the wit and I enjoyed the gothic style mystery and the bizarre details such as the decaying Rolls Royce in the barn and the decaying auto repair shed at the village library. All is decay, but no detail is unimportant: the reader needs to keep awake.

The pacing is very appealing. You are drawn in straight away by the opening: "It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door." You know straight away that you are in for an embattled protagonist, dark secrets, violence and domestic misery.

Sure enough, Flavia's father is soon arrested for the murder and Flavia takes it upon herself to prove he did not do it. Her quest brings her face to face with some very adult issues involving love, loyalty, guilt, revenge, despair, vanity, and misunderstanding. At one time I thought I understood what the sweetness at the bottom of the pie was, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps when you have read the book you will understand.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a shocking murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective by Kate Summerscale

Do you like a classical murder mystery set in an English country house? What’s more, do you prefer your murder to be set in the Victorian era, when in upper and middle class homes complex and rigid social conventions only too often bred secrets and perversions behind closed doors? If you do, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher should be just the thing for you; despite the fact that it is not a fictional tale at all, but a true story that took place in England in an upper class country home in Wiltshire in 1860.

Ms. Summerscale, a journalist and former literary editor, has written an enthralling true crime story that encompasses all the details that fans of true crime stories find essential: the crime, the suspects’ actions, the police investigations, blunders, and breakthroughs, and also the detailed proceedings of the various court hearings. At the same time, she has managed to pen a story that draws you in with its narrative style and does not get bogged down in the detail. The book is very well crafted and leads the reader on, not only through the details of the case, but also through Ms. Summerscale’s argument. She argues that this case was the real case that gave rise to the conventions and popularity of country house murder fiction continuing today. Many of the real details of the case appeared in fiction in the years that followed; for example, the case influenced tales like The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Mr. Whicher, one of the founding eight members of the Detective force at Scotland Yard, was the original popular heroic detective, and was interviewed and quoted by Charles Dickens. Like the fictional Cuff in The Moonstone, Whicher embodied for the public the archetype intuitive, intellectual detective, who caught criminals by using his powerful observation of people and clues. When Whicher’s long career was substantially ruined by this case in Wiltshire, there arose a further era of detective fiction where the detective is seen as either crass and inept, or as a dark influence, a lower-class intruder into the sanctity and secrets of the middle class home.

This book can be enjoyed on many levels. You can appreciate Ms. Summerscales’ scholarship in the infinite details of mid-Victorian English culture that she lays out for us, and in her deep knowledge of the crime fiction of the era and also of Scotland Yard and the judicial system. She writes perceptively of the people involved in the case, so that you soon begin to see that all the characters involved in the case are full of secrets. Ms. Summerscale compares this case to classical murder mysteries where everyone is a suspect with things to hide. The detective has to sift through all the secrets and see which suspect is hiding the fact that he or she is a murderer. In this case in Wiltshire, the person convicted may or may not have been the culprit. You will have to read the book to find out!