The evolution of the children’s mystery story Imogen Russell Williams plays detective


M


ystery and detection have been a staple of children’s literature almost from its beginnings – at least from the point at which child characters are first given individual


rather than acting as moral archetypes or the stars of cautionary tales.


E Nesbit’s


Treasure Seekers, for example, take a (disastrous) turn at being detectives; Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn track down Injun Joe’s buried treasure and prevent an innocent man suffering for another’s


crime; and Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives perhaps the first mystery story written for children, was first published in 1929 and has remained hugely popular ever since - in English, it has never been out of print.


Hard on Kästner’s heels comes Enid Blyton. From the Five Find- Outers to the Secret Seven and the Famous Five, all of whom appeared 1940s,


in the the prolific


author is best known for her freewheeling detective children, solving crimes which baffle the regular police between voracious consumption of biscuits, cherry


sandwiches, cake


and lemonade. Blyton’s and conundrums, espionage


never features in


Murder cosy


but


kidnap, theft, poison- pen letters, insurance fraud


scientific are


fair


game, as well as sneaky


little 18 Books for Keeps No.222 January 2017 dodges


like disguising prize cats with paint; her


agency,


juvenile crime-fighters boast skills such as ventriloquism, code- cracking and escaping from locked rooms. Taking up where Blyton leaves off, Anthony Horowitz’s humorously hard-boiled Diamond Brothers, a.k.a. the world’s worst detective and his considerably cleverer thirteen-year-old sibling, appear in the 1980s, as does Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart, sixteen-year-old star of The Ruby and the Smoke and its sequels. And, from the 1930s almost to the present day, the quick-witted, well-turned-out Nancy Drew holds sway in America and beyond, occupying a charmed overlap between the worlds of coddled childhood and independent, well-resourced maturity.


The norms of children’s mystery fiction up to the end of the twentieth century


p re d om i na nt l y middle-class privileged


include or


juvenile


heroes; a male leader or protagonist, with exceptional cleverness and daring usually


remaining


male preserves; and little to no bloodshed. There are exceptions – Kästner’s hero, for instance, is the son of


a hairdresser, a


single mother who can ill-afford to lose the money of which Emil is robbed; and Pullman’s Sally Lockhart deals unflinchingly with murder and other grim realities. In the main, though, the genre is marked out by a sense of formula, safety and reassurance – comfort, challenge, is the order of the day.


rather than


In the twenty-first century, however, a boom in children’s mystery fiction has seen these norms undergo significant change. In the work of Robin Stevens, Katherine Woodfine, Lyn Gardner, Julia Lee, Tanya Landman, Frances Hardinge and others, blood is frequently shed, and young characters – and readers – are not shielded from the realities of violence and death. Echoing Pullman’s trailblazing series, there is a definite pull towards historical settings, especially the Edwardian and Victorian (although Stevens’ books are set in a 1930s boarding school), and the heroic detectives are now overwhelmingly female. Most notably, perhaps, the mores of the times during which these stories are set are not comfortably accepted as the default, as in the crime dramatisations where luscious lipstick and crisp tailor-mades are spot-lit at the expense of social inequality and casual racism. Here, everyday unpleasantness is held up to scrutiny – not heavy- handedly, with contemporary filters anachronistically applied to the


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