The Grave's a Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley

(read aloud - review written for the March 2018 meeting of Cozmic Writers II)

Alan Bradley was writing about an English family and was describing the front entrance of their imposing estate mansion. He happened to notice a girl he thought to be about 11, sitting on a low wall next to the driveway. When I say noticed I am of course talking about his imagining, but it is an "imagining into being," the creation of someone real. And he was so taken by her he started over and wrote about her as the central figure of his novels.

Meet Flavia de Luce, rhymes with Batavia, who lives at Buckshaw, an estate outside a small English village with her widower father and her two older sisters. And she is real. Because if she is not real, how can I know her too? And I do know her, or think I do.

It is impossible to tell where Alan Bradley's genius ends and Flavia's begins. After 8 books, we are still surprised at her wit, wisdom and precocity, but she is ever and always the young girl.

These are murder mysteries and Flavia is an amateur sleuth. She is unperturbed by dead bodies and well-versed in chemistry, particularly poisons. But her secret weapon is that as a young girl, she is socially invisible, and with her mother deceased and her grieving father psychologically absent, she and her trusty bike Gladys have the run of the countryside.

We see the world through her eyes as she describes her thoughts and exploits. But reading between the lines we see that many of the adults are looking after her in a way that she is perhaps only partly aware of. And though her father loves her deeply, we can see that Flavia reminds him so much of his wife it is almost unbearable. Her mother was a wealthy heiress who was an adventurer, airplane pilot, and explorer, a force of nature. She went missing on an adventure years before and her body was only discovered in the sixth book. Her place in the novels is as a looming presence or more precisely an absence. Her mother's Rolls Royce is sitting in the garage untouched and covered with dust, a symbol of past opulence and present grief. Buckshaw is slowly decaying. Flavia's world is a contradiction. On one hand the joy of a young girl making sense of her world and decorating it with exciting murder investigations and chemistry experiments. And on the other hand a blanket of deep sorrow. Her father and his valet were both severely traumatized in the war and have an unshakeable bond of shared suffering. This valet, Dogger (once a military physician), is Flavia's most dependable support but at times it seems she is taking care of him and her father as well of only by giving them a reason to carry on.

Flavia notices everything. She reads science books and has made a chemistry lab in her quarters in an abandoned wing of the mansion. She learns culture from her older sisters who are interested in music and literature, also escaping into worlds of their own as their father's situation is collapsing.

But Flavia is irrepressible, her mother reborn, life is an adventure. Every person is a possible suspect, or witness, or clue, or confidant. So we follow her around Buckshaw, around the village of Bishop's Lacey, visiting the Vicar, running into the Inspector and his wife, meeting her imposing Aunt Felicity at the railway station, and predictably, finding dead bodies, sometimes in the first chapter. The authorities arrive and do their job but it is Flavia who finds some telltale clue, spirits it up to her lab and using her bunsen burner and microscope finds some anomaly that she offhandedly leaks to Inspector Hewitt and the case is solved with none but us insiders the wiser.

So I say this to you Flavia, don't grow up. We need you. You delight in the world. You see people in their unguarded moments. Reading about poisons may have given you a feeling of power. But your real power is giving joy to your readers. I'm glad Alan Bradley saw you sitting by the side of the lane. Keep coming to visit.