The topic of murder is often viewed as a controversial


topic for


the intended age group. It may be all the more controversial when setting a story on the housing estate


and featuring


two Black protagonists. However Jackson appears very much aware of the complexities in this regard. A YouTube video of the news report of the murder has ‘The black man did it!’ at the top of the comments, a realistic example of online racism. Elsewhere the theme of gentrification emerges: ‘buying flowers from Whitford


Market was


clearly out of our budget. The World’s Most Expensive Cheese Sandwich had made that crystal clear.’ (168)


Narrator Nik and her sister Norva are initially broadly sketched as logical and emotionally attuned respectively – ‘According to her, she’s the Gut and I’m the Nut’ – (2). However their existence as Black detectives in British children’s fiction is momentous. This becomes all the more apparent when we notice the list of TV detective shows that Norva enjoys watching. The Bill, Midsomer Murders and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries are not shows renowned for their ethnic diversity. Indeed in 2011 then-producer of Midsomer Murders, Brian Tue-May was quoted by the BBC as saying, ‘We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them.’ Lack of representation is not an issue confined to children’s literature; fans of detective stories not yet old enough to watch the post-watershed Luther starring Idris Elba are highly unlikely to encounter Black British detectives. Until now. Jackson emphasizes the problem-solving aspect of the genre, commenting ‘Murder mystery is basically a game that can be played and written in new ways.’


Thematic series Voices is a new historical fiction series by Scholastic. The series consultant, Tony Bradman, commissioned writers to write stories featuring central characters from under-represented groups with a focus on periods which feature in the Key Stage 2 National History Curriculum. The series kicks off with Bali Rai’s Now or Never – A Dunkirk Story telling the story of Private Fazal Khan who travels from his home in India to the battlefields of the Second Word War. Fazal experiences moments of solidarity from some of the English soldiers he encounters, (not least Captain John Ashdown, father of politician the late Paddy Ashdown) but he is struck by the discrimination he faces from those fighting on the same side; ‘For the first time, I had learned of my place in the pecking order of British India. I was one place above my unfortunate mules.’ (p190)


Patrice Lawrence’s Diver’s Daughter – A Tudor Story explores the life of a young East African girl, Eve, living with her mother in the Southwark slums of Elizabethan London. When they hear from a Mary Rose survivor, George Symon, that one of the African free- divers who was sent to salvage its treasures is alive and well and living in Southampton, mother and daughter agree to try and find him and attempt to dive the wreck of another ship, rumoured to be rich with treasures. Lawrence’s tale stresses the everyday humanity of her characters and brings to life the challenges faced by African descendants in Britain in the sixteenth century. This series is seen as a long-overdue addition to books such as H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story, described by its author as ‘not a history lesson, but a story book’ (Marshall, 2005 [1905]: xxi –xxii) and by then-Prime Minister David Cameron as ‘my favourite book’. Patrice Lawrence


comments ‘The UK’s history is shaped by people with roots across the world’. The Voices series is a step toward fully acknowledging the humanity of those with roots beyond this island.


NOTES


McGillis, Roderick. ‘Series Books’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 14.4: 162. Ray, Sheila. The Blyton Phenomenon: The controversy surrounding the world’s most successful writer. Andre Deutsch, 1982. Searle, Allison. ‘Fantastical fact, home, or other? The imagined ‘medieval’ in C. S. Lewis.’ Mythlore 3/4: 5-15.


High Rise Mystery, Sharna Jackson, Knights Of, 978-1999642518, £6.99 pbk


Now or Never – A Dunkirk Story, Bali Rai, Scholastic, 978-1407191362, £6.99 pbk


Diver’s Daughter – A Tudor Story, Patrice Lawrence, Scholastic, 978-1407191409, £6.99 pbk


Karen Sands-O’Connor is professor of English at SUNY Buffalo State in New York. She has, as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, worked with Seven Stories, the National Centre for the Children’s Book, and has recently published Children’s Publishing and Black Britain 1965-2015 (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).


Darren Chetty is a teacher, doctoral researcher and writer with research interests in education, philosophy, racism, children’s literature and hip hop culture. He is a contributor to The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla and published by Unbound, and tweets at @rapclassroom


Books for Keeps No.236 May 2019 17


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