384 pages, Bantam Books, ISBN-13978-0385343497
So, back in June of 2022, I got a new job at the Fraser Public Library in beautiful Fraser, Michigan, and one of my assigned duties was coordinating the Mysteries & Munchies book club in which a new mystery book is read every month and we discuss it while chowing down on junk food. A job right up my alley. One of the first books I assigned for the group was Alan Bradley’s first-ever mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and am I ever glad that I did. In a nutshell: it is 1950 in England and Flavia de Luce, third daughter of a minor gentry family and aspiring chemist, finds herself in the middle of a series of events that have struck Buckshaw, the crumbling manor house her family has called home for centuries. Oh, and she’s only 11-years-old.
These prototypical eccentric members of the English gentry consist of the father, Colonel de Luce, a distant man still grieving for his dead wife (Harriet de Luce, the mother, disappeared in a mountain climbing accident when Flavia was an infant) and sisters 17-year-old Ophelia and 13-year-old Daphne. Things around Buckshaw become interesting when a dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak…while mere hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches as he takes his dying breath – and is absolutely delighted: “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life”.
And that, my Dear Readers, is Flavia de Luce for ya, one of the most interesting, unique and engaging heroines I have ever read about. To call her “precocious” would be an understatement, for as the youngest of three daughters to an old family in good standing in the English peerage, our Flavia has always had it good and sees no reason not to go about her business as if the world existed for her alone to glory in. But she has reason to feel so, as her intelligence, her drive and her moxy are second to none, and as she pursues her own investigative lines of inquiry (quite independent of Inspector Hewitt, the patient if put-upon detective ostensibly in charge of the case), we cheer her on and follow her reasoning as easily as if we were there ourselves.
Which is another thing to like about this book and this character: as intelligent and tenacious as Flavia is, she is still realistically drawn. While her knowledge is the result of aristocratic homeschooling and self-taught discovery, I never got the sense that it was unrealistic or over-the-top; Flavia knows a lot, but she doesn’t know everything. Her lines of inquiry are the result of logic and reasoning, not dumb luck or convenient events. And the adults in her world – her father, the folks of the village, the inspector and other policemen – treat her as they would any other 11-year-old girl in 1950s England: with polite contempt, something Flavia feels and is infuriated by. But, as the old saying goes, she doesn’t get mad, she gets even.
She goes charging around Bishop’s Lacey on Gladys (her bicycle, inherited from her long-lost mother) while going into rhapsodies about her love of chemistry and exhibiting that annoying preteen quality of being able to notice things you wish they wouldn’t and arguing constantly in support of their viewpoint – two qualities needed by tenacious detectives everywhere. A truly well-realized and believable character, Flavia de Luce captures the reader as much for her mistakes as for her successes, and as she goes about her business in attempting to rescue her father from an accusation of murder, she does so in a spirit and a style all her own, and we glory in her pride of knowledge and confidence right along with her.
Should The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie prove as popular with the book club as it has with me, I fully expect to read the further adventures of Flavia de Luce – precocious girl, aspiring chemist and accidental detective – in the very near future.
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