As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley

Definitely recommended.įlavia de Luce has left Buckshaw, the family home where she has lived all her life and has gone to school in Canada (actually, 'was sent' is more accurate - the decision was none of Flavia's making and she felt that she'd been banished). There's none of the usual supporting cast but it's still a great read. Summary: The seventh Flavia de Luce novel sees Flavia at school in Canada. To me, each of these seems to have exactly the right balance of whimsy and menace, and these are promises that are admirably fulfilled in the books that follow. The convention of Slightly Foxed dictates that titles are normally tucked away in a footnote, but I think it is worth savouring the delightful cadence of all six here: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag A Red Herring without Mustard I Am Half-Sick of Shadows Speaking from among the Bones and The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches. On the face of it, crimes don’t get much cosier than those which appear in the first six novels of the Flavia sequence. In view of this, I sometimes wonder what Raymond Chandler would have made of Alan Bradley and his pugnacious heroine Flavia de Luce. In his view, crime writing only really came of age with Dashiell Hammett and the fast-talking, hard-punching heroes of a new American tradition, of which Chandler himself is perhaps now the best-known exponent. Not for him solutions that hinged on the potting of prize-winning begonias or the carefully calibrated murder with a platinum stiletto.

In a famous essay of 1950 called ‘The Simple Art of Murder’, the novelist satirized the intricate, ingenious and implausible plots of the great English detective writers and scoffed at their emphasis upon the perfect puzzle, rather than the reality of human action. Raymond Chandler was not a great fan of the ‘cosy’ crime novel. Reviewed by Andy Merrills in Slightly Foxed Issue 55. Girls have been disappearing from Miss Bodycote’s, leading Flavia to wonder what exactly the academy’s true purpose is. And the mystery of a withered corpse is only the beginning. With its forbidding headmistress, intimidating teachers and bizarre rules, adapting to Miss Bodycote’s could be a matter of life and death.īut Flavia is soon on familiar ground when she is presented with a gruesome puzzle to solve. Each mystery can be read in series order or as a standalone novel.įlavia’s world is turned upside down when she is banished to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Canada – her mother Harriet’s old boarding school.

The seventh title in Alan Bradley’s series of historical mysteries featuring Flavia de Luce.

As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley