On Crime

Like Sherlock Holmes - only with pigtails

By Hallie Ephron, published in the Boston Globe May 31, 2009

THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE
By Alan Bradley
Delacorte, 384 pp., $23

THE LANGUAGE OF BEES
By Laurie R. King
Bantam, 448 pp, $25

THE FRIGHTENED MAN
By Kenneth Cameron
Minotaur, 272 pp, $24.95

British author Alan Bradley's witty debut novel "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" delivers a delightful new sleuth. A combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes, Flavia de Luce is a fearless, cheeky, wildly precocious 11-year-old whose "particular passion is poison." It's the summer of 1950, and Flavia is living, much too quietly for her taste, with her two detestable sisters at Buckshaw, a rambling English estate with bedrooms like "vast, dim Zeppelin hangars." A budding chemist, she's nourished by benign neglect from her morose widower father and watched over by his elderly retainer, Dogger.

One morning, Flavia is up and wandering about before dawn when she literally trips over a man, expiring in the cucumber patch. With his dying breath, one tinged with a "peculiar odor," he utters a single word: "Vale." Farewell. Far from being horrified, she declares this "by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."

She knows this suspicious death is related to a jack snipe found hours earlier on the kitchen steps, "its stiff wings extended like a little pterodactyl, its eyes rather unpleasantly filmed over." Impaled on "the long black needle of its bill" was a postage stamp. One glimpse of the bird and her father goes pale and gasps for breath. He's later arrested.

Flavia stays a hop, skip, and several jumps ahead of the police as she tears about the village on Gladys (her bicycle), pigtails streaming, investigating the dead man's connection to her father and to the infamous theft of a priceless stamp. Undeterred by locked doors and spurred on by her father's arrest, whenever she encounters an obstacle she asks herself, "What would Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier have done?"

Sounds cutesy-cute, but it's not. This utterly unique sleuth is a welcome addition to the genre.

Laurie R. King's "The Language of Bees" is her ninth novel featuring Mary Russell, Sherlock Holmes's plucky young wife and detecting partner. Holmes was in his 50s when he met unhappy, 15-year-old Russell. Nine years later it's 1924, and they are happily married. The couple's return to London from their second home in Sussex is marked by a Perseids meteor shower, the discovery that one of their beloved beehives is "hemorrhaging bees," and the arrival of a bearded visitor. He's a Bohemian who exudes the faint aroma of turpentine and whose fingernails are tinged with color. Russell is immediately struck by his presence - "he could play a stage Lucifer."

"Hello, Father," Damian Adler greets Holmes.

Russell had met Adler five years earlier when he was charged with murder and exonerated. A brilliant surrealist painter, his mother was Irene Adler, a character in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" and the only woman to get the better of Holmes. After their brief liaison ended, Adler never revealed to Holmes that she'd born him a son.

Now the son again needs his father's help. His young Chinese wife, Yolanda, a former child prostitute, has disappeared along with his daughter, Estelle. The trail will lead to a mysterious religious text and a cult that may be linked to a suicide at Stonehenge and other deaths. The evil villain of the tale is a worthy successor to Moriarty. This is a dense, complicated story that will reward the diligent reader. King enriches the Sherlockian legacy by giving Holmes a partner who is every bit as brilliant as he, albeit more often mistaken and far less prone to take herself too seriously.

Kenneth Cameron's "The Frightened Man" features "gentleman detective" Denton. The American ex-pat author ("a nobody who had become a literary lion") lives in turn-of-the-century London with his man servant, the gloomy Sergeant Atkins. The story opens with the eponymous frightened man, R. Mulcahy, bursting in upon Denton, insisting: "I need protection, I do." He claims he's just been recognized by the Ripper, a killer whom he watched rape and murder a young girl years earlier when they were both boys.

Denton dismisses this tale as hysterical nonsense until the "Grisly Murder" of a teenaged prostitute named Stella Minter is reported in the next morning's news. The crime scene bears similarities to the murder Mulcahy claimed to have witnessed.

Denton tries to alert Scotland Yard, but the police, who have already arrested a South African whom they claim confessed to the crime, brush him off. Denton's doubts that they have the right man are confirmed when Denton and Atkins are brutally attacked by an intruder.

Meanwhile, Denton is suffering severe writer's block and growing short on cash. Like all good protagonists, he has a dark past. Guilt-wracked over his unhappy marriage that ended with his wife's suicide, now he's struggling to write his novel's female character.

He finds an unlikely helpmate in the tough, smart, thoroughly liberated Janet Striker. Her explanation for much of the violence in the world: "Men hate women." Filled with rich period detail, a gritty London comes alive in this satisfying novel, which contains a thoughtful exploration of the relationship among love, sex, and perversion, and between violence and self-loathing.