“The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag” by Alan Bradley

 

384 pages, Bantam Books, ISBN-13: 978-0385343459

The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan Bradley is the sequel to The Sweetness At the Bottom of the Pie (reviewed last month) and once again stars everyone’s favorite precocious 11-year-old hellion, Flavia de Luce. As in Sweetness, Flavia is found running wild in her village of Bishop’s Lacey when beloved BBC puppeteer Rupert Porson (and his “companion” Nialla) arrive and set up shop – and all hell breaks loose. Once again finding herself not-so-reluctantly investigating not one murder, but two, our dangerously clever chemist-in-training endeavors to discover just what happened not only in her present day, but five years previously, when another seemingly unrelated tragedy rocked this most-English of villages.

While Sweetness started right out the gate with a murder in Chapter 2, Hangman’s takes more time to get going, with Flavia peddling ‘round on Gladys and giving exposition on the new visitors and the village, the happenings of several years prior and other character’s lives, both old and new. It isn’t boring, per se, and Flavia is never nothing if not interesting – although this time around her obvious need of adult supervision and discipline is more glaring and a smidge less charming (but only a smidge). When the vile act at last occurs and, thence, leads to the rediscovery of the death of a little boy five years previous – a little boy who, had he lived, would have been Flavia’s age – our favorite English answer to Nancy Drew comes alive and we are off to the races.

Hangman’s is a decent enough mystery, steeped in the sunny atmosphere of rural England after the War, but what makes it exceptional is, of course, Flavia. She is a wonderfully wrought character: dauntless, clever, manipulative and eccentric in the great English minor gentry tradition. She is fascinated by and skilled in making poisons, knows how to get people to tell things they would never otherwise reveal and relentless in her quest to find out who did what and why, if not to see justice done – no Crusader she – but to solve a problem as if it were a chemical equation. That she does so without the assistance of the police – indeed, independent of them – makes her all the more fascinating (and at times, I must admit, just a little…far-fetched. But just a little).

All of which makes her rather intimidating, which Flavia knows all too well; at one point, when she shows too much insight into the affairs of Nialla, the young woman she is helping, she says to her “You are terrifying…You really are. Do you know that?”, to which Flavia responds “Yes…[i]t was true – and there was no use denying it”. And, during the denouement, when Flavia reveals a crucial piece of information to Inspector Hewitt, he turns to his team and demands to know why they hadn’t discovered this, Sergeant Woolmer’s response is “With respect, sir…it could be because we’re not Miss De Luce”. Too true, Sarge, too true. If only all police forces had a Flavia on them crime would dry up in no time flat.

But Flavia is still a well-drawn character, as, for all of her ferocious intellect and startling preciosity, she is only an 11-year-old girl; observant enough to uncover an affair but innocent enough not to be entirely sure what is involved in such an undertaking. She is also a lonely girl without enough love in her life: her elder sisters treat her badly; her father is distant, repressed and as obsessed with stamps as Flavia is with poisons; her mother is dead and her only connection to her is to sit in the Rolls she owned or to ride the bike she used, which she has rechristened Gladys and treats as if it were sentient; there is also family jack-of-all-trades, Dogger, but he suffers from PTSD and isn’t always there, in every definition.

Flavia is not a girl who is trying to be anything other than what she is; above all she seems to be trying just to be herself which she does with great self-assurance. When she turns up late (again) and her father describes her as “Utterly unreliable” she thinks to herself: “Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself. Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable”. Quite. And she is willing to overstep the bounds of politeness and perhaps even decency to get the information she wants but is perfectly reconciled to that aspect of herself, saying, after out-right lying to someone to ferret out what she wants to know: “Sometimes I hated myself. But not for long”. No, never for long.