past, but with thought-provoking, delicate nuance. Robin Stevens’ narrator Hazel Wong, for instance, is marked out as an outsider, just as Christie’s Poirot is, by ‘foreignness’. Where Poirot’s outsider status works frequently in his favour, however, putting the unrighteous off their guard, Hazel’s means that she must remain perpetually braced for insult or putdown in the coldly insular world of Deepdean School for Girls – and fight harder, too, for her achievements to be recognised.


Murder itself is not treated cosily in contemporary children’s mystery fiction, either. In Murder Most Unladylike, the moment at which Hazel discovers the broken body of Miss Bell in the gymnasium is not soft-focused or downplayed, but given a vivid sense of shocking reality; and the retrieval of a drowned woman from the Thames in The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth packs a similar tragic punch. The body-count is high in Tanya Landman’s Poppy Fields books, too – although their sardonic hardboiled humour prevents their goriness becoming overwhelming, they are emphatically not for the squeamish.


The social status of many young detectives has also changed since the solidly middle-class Blyton heyday - and the expected Cinderellaesque shape of their stories has changed alongside it. In a Nesbit or Hodgson Burnett universe, a ‘genteel’ girl like Katherine Woodfine’s Sophie Taylor, having ‘lowered herself’ to work in a shop, would probably be raised again by mysterious pecuniary benefaction – but, in Woodfine’s world, hard work (and skilled, courageous deduction) is its own reward, and


Books mentioned The Ruby and the Smoke, Philip Pullman, Scholastic, 978-1407154190, £7.99 Murder Most Unladylike, Robin Stevens, Puffin, 978-0141369761, £6.99 The Mystery of the Jewelled Moth, Katherine Woodfine, Egmont, £6.99 Nancy Parker’s Diary of Detection, Julia Lee, Oxford, 978-0192739384, £6.99 Nancy Parker’s Spooky Speculations, Julia Lee, Oxford, 978-0192746979, £6.99 The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1447264101, £7.99 Emil and the Detectives, Erich Kastner, Red Fox, 978-0099413127, £5.99 pbk The Falcon’s Malteser, Anthony Horowitz, Walker Books, 978-1406365832, £6.99 pbk Mondays are Murder, Tanya Landman, Walker Books, 978-1406344417, £5.99 pbk


Sophie is happy to remain part of the intoxicating world of Sinclair’s department store. Lyn Gardner’s foundling Rose Campion is deeply loyal to the gilded, gaslit music hall where she grew up, proudly declaring that ‘Campion’s will always be my home’ amid melodrama, murder and mistaken identity. And, in The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge’s fourteen- year-old heroine Faith Sunderly, having cut herself off from society by practising scandalous, scientific, free-ranging detection,


shows no inclination to


mend her ways; rather, she faces the censure and uncertainty the future almost certainly holds for her with tenacious, total resolve.


Sales of mystery fiction aimed at young readers are currently booming, with more examples appearing all the time. Perhaps it’s because mystery fiction operates along the same wish-fulfilling lines as magical fantasy – but detective stories are, thrillingly, possible in a way that receiving a Hogwarts letter isn’t. If they can’t be born wizards, children can undoubtedly be quick- witted, allowing for the realistic triumph of youthful courage, tenacity and ingenuity over adult ineptitude or injustice. It’s particularly appealing, too, to see girls’ gifts for ratiocination – and sheer bloodymindedness – well-represented. To me, the newest young mystery fiction is compelling because it takes the best of the Blyton era – including a boundless sense of belief in kids’ ability to function alone – and couple it with the thoughtfulness and diversity she lacks. These are stories that refuse to pull punches or sugar-coat the unpalatable, but celebrate youth’s ability to outthink adult authority, even in the most stifling or oppressive of times.


Imogen Russell Williams is a journalist and editorial consultant specialising in children’s literature and YA.


Books for Keeps No.222 January 2017 19


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