no shit, sherlock

the secret of the clue of the abandoned murder of the mysterious haunted mansion staircase of the baskervilles

Oct 08, 2024

I went through a big detective phase growing up that feels a little quaint now to think about. My international school’s library was my main source of English language content1 and it contained mostly classics and ‘Christian’ themed books2 so Sherlock Holmes was my main fix for a while. I have a memory of screaming out “the speckled band! the speckled band!”3 as my sister and I like reenacted? a story or a play while we were homeschooled? Mom, was this our literature class? Actually, I may have been introduced to Holmes even younger through the tv show Wishbone4, the only dog I ever cared about5. And speaking of tv shows, what was better than being lauded as a ‘gumshoe’ by The Chief from Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego!?

Eventually a shelf with shiny, yellow spines caught my eye and so Nancy Drew became my close companion. These were sweet and dopey and I devoured them all. I remember being especially charmed by their perfectly packaged picnic lunches, blue convertibles, Nancy’s ‘titan’ hair, girl George, ‘pleasantly plump’6 Bess and with titles like ‘The Sign of the Twisted Candles’ and ‘The Mystery of the Moss Covered Mansion’ and ‘The Ghost of Blackwood Hall’ how could you resist?

My love for red herrings, macguffins and eavesdropping led to my orphan/abandoned child sleuth phase with The Boxcar Children and the Mandie books7 until I finally leveled way up to the queen of the genre, Agatha Christie. I was introduced to her by my beloved fourth grade teacher8 who recommended starting with the classic Murder on the Orient Express and I’ve collected Christie paperbacks ever since.9 Agatha Christie will get her own shelf here someday but (spoilers) my favorite of hers is And Then There Were None10.

I think my obsession with detective stories stems from my love of control, of understanding and of sense making. I need things to be logical and contained to feel a sense of comfort, control and peace. These stories are dark, weird and confusing until the very end where everything11 wraps up neatly. Like a cold chicken sandwich wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. Every detail in its pages matters and your attention is rewarded, your wits are engaged, you’re encouraged to interact with the story and in the end, all the twists and turns reveal a full, coherent picture like a jigsaw puzzle. I find this very soothing when done correctly and extremely irritating when not. Today’s shelf contains some fun takes on the genre and its tropes, homaging the classics while upending the expected.

Don your deerstalker, polish your magnifying class and get those little grey cells firing as you inspect one of these.

FLAVIA DE LUCE SERIES by Alan Bradley

Living with her distant father and two odious older sisters in the idyllic 1950s English countryside, eleven year old Flavia de Luce isn’t your typical detective. A chemistry enthusiast often left to her own devices, the headstrong and precocious Flavia keeps finding (or placing) herself in the middle of murder mysteries. In this first book of the series12, Flavia’s father is falsely accused of murdering a visitor whose body is found in the gardens of their home, Buckshaw Manor. Taking matters into her own hands, Flavia begins to gather clues, perform experiments and use her youth to her advantage as she works to clear her father’s name and perhaps even gain some respect from her sisters in the process.

Flavia is an unforgettable protagonist, but she isn’t for everyone. If you enjoy clever, plucky, incorrigible children that view rules as light suggestions, are experts at getting into scrapes and are brainy but decidedly lacking in common sense and self preservation then you’ll love this series.13 Flavia is obsessed with poisons, has her own chemistry lab and often teams up with family friend, Dogger the groundskeeper14, to talk through her deductions. I enjoyed the sisterly dynamics here with each of them withholding affection and dispensing insults while harboring love way deep down inside, only allowing it to escape under extreme duress. Flavia’s childishness lends a light, spirited energy to dark themes but she continuously matures emotionally as the books progress and is not without vulnerability especially in her search for maternal figures.

I love this insight from the author about Flavia commandeering his story 15 giving him the idea for his debut novel at age 70:

"Like Athena, who sprang fully formed and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, Flavia simply appeared," the author says, speaking from his home in British Columbia. "She walked onto the page of another book I was writing, and simply hijacked the story. I had no idea who she was or where she came from, and because of that, I resisted her. It took Flavia a while to make me shut up and listen."

This has many trappings of the cozy mystery genre: a remote English manor, an adorable small town16, eccentric side characters with ridiculously charming names, post-war sensibilities and an atypical detective which makes this an endearing read that is still mysterious, clever and consistently amusing. The writing voice feels very old school mystery novel-ey and could pass as written earlier than its 2009 publication date. I read these until about #7 or #8, when it veered into to a plot direction that I just didn’t buy and didn’t seem to entirely fit the vibe. However, I’m tickled by titles like "‘I Am Half-Sick of Shadows’, ‘The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches’ and ‘Thrice the Blinded Cat Hath Mew'd’ so perhaps I will jump back into the series someday. Maybe next time I find myself on a train whisking my way through the quaint17 , sheep dotted, English countryside.

Oh my god, I just saw that it may become a film with Martin Freeman! Terrific, because it does read as quite cinematic. Though it really should be a mini-series/tv show, but these people never ask for my opinion.

It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.

EIGHT DETECTIVES by Alex Pavesi18

After her boss at Blood Type Books discovers a decades old, self-published manuscript of detective stories, Julia is tasked with meeting with the reclusive author, Professor Grant McCallister, at his cottage on a remote Mediterranean island to see about revising it for publication. McCallister’s manuscript is unique as he attempts to ‘join the world of mathematics to the imprecise world of literature’ so included his research paper The Permutations of Detective Fiction as an appendix arguing that there are four essential ingredients that make up every murder mystery story. The argument that ‘anything having them is a murder mystery and every murder mystery must have them’ corresponds to the seven short stories which each explore different ‘permutations’ of these archetypes. As Julia and the Professor go through the tales one by one, analyzing, dissecting and critiquing them begins to reveal a story behind the stories and Julia realizes that she’ll need all of her wits about her if she is going to out-detect a master of the art form.

This is for any and all aficionados of the detective story as it pays homage to all sorts of classics before turning them inside out and upside down again and again. There are all sorts of ingenious clues and details hidden throughout every chapter and it is a blast trying to keep up with Julia, a shrewd perfectionist19 eager to understand all the levels at play here. Even if you aren’t a close, detail obsessed reader I think you’ll still enjoy the ride.

Alternating between the stories and Julia and McCallister’s conversations, we get to watch some fascinating literary dissection and analysis that at first seems primarily scholastic until little by little a more sinister picture begins to emerge. I loved how the back and forth dynamic grow more tense as the literal heat builds among the unforgiving beauty of the remote island. Great use of setting. Each story is tautly paced and presents its own brain twister until, once even more layers are revealed, everything shifts and swirls yet again making it an embarrassment of riches that feels both classic and modern as it honors yet toys with the tropes of the genre. For people who enjoy puzzles in their novels all the detailed setups, scattered clues and mental games will be especially stimulating. I love how this plays with all the usual ingredients to create something completely distinctive.

“That’s the beauty of the genre… It presents the reader with a small, finite number of options, and then at the end it just circles back and commits to one of them. It’s really a miracle that the human brain could ever be surprised by such a solution, when you think about it.”

“The craft, then, is in the misdirection: in picking the solution that in some ways seems the most unsuitable to the story you’ve written, but in other ways fits perfectly.”

THE CITY AND THE CITY by China Miéville

Inspector Borlú lives in the city-state of Beszel where he works for the Extreme Crime Squad. While investigating the gruesome murder of a female foreign exchange student he becomes embroiled in the city’s seedy underbelly leading him to political, cultural and mythical conspiracies tied to Beszel’s sister city, Ul Qoma. These cities are not simply neighbors, but conjoined twins; existing side by side, in and among each other while its citizens are forbidden from interacting, acknowledging, or even seeing the other city. Mysterious and draconian consequences await anyone who commits the egregious sin of “breach”. As his investigation escalates, Borlú crosses the border from one city to the other causing an upheaval of his entire worldview and understanding of reality.

The main draw of this is its almost brain breaking setting which takes it from classic detective story to a sort of dystopian/speculative fiction/noir hybrid. These entwined cities have always existed in their very special way with no clear origin story and are kept in line by the shadowy, Orwellian agency of Breach. This is such an imaginative concept that could be fascinating in any number of genres but placing the trope heavy detective story within these borders is especially intriguing because we know those beats, but in this setting they get thrown out the window. How would/could one live in such a space? Live with rules that require a complete revising of what your eyes see, a submission to a dictated reality and a level of willful ignorance that is almost herculean. This way of living initially feels completely ungraspable, but it soon dawns on the reader that this is an activity we do daily. What aspects of our own communities, our cities, our shared spaces do we ignore and which do we embrace? Why? We don’t have ‘Breach’ breathing down our necks, so what causes our averted eyes, our avoided sidewalks, our roundabout routes? What violence is done by this denial? The simple act of ‘unseeing’ becomes a complex act of re-narration as we pretzel ourselves into more comfortable shapes. The setting shines brightest here, but story, characters and writing all live up to its terrific core concept. I felt quite moved by this and find myself thinking about it and its convicting premise often.

But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Beszel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marveling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.