The Weed That Strings The Hangman’s Bag
By Alan Bradley
Orion, $38.99
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

There is something utterly seductive about escaping into a Flavia de Luce story – they’re the antidote to the harsh realities of modern life.

Precocious heroine, Flavia, is an 11-year-old amateur detective who pedals round the sleepy village of Bishop’s Lacey on her trusty bicycle solving murders that have the local police flummoxed.

In the first book, The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie, Flavia discovers a dead body in the cucumber patch of her family’s crumbling mansion and has to prove her rather dotty father isn’t the killer. This time round it’s the dramatic death of a travelling puppeteer during a performance of Jack and the Beanstalk that tests Flavia’s sleuthing skills. She finds herself pedaling far and wide as she makes a link between the mystery death and an earlier village tragedy - the hanging of a small boy.

Set in the 1950s, the de Luce books are shamelessly nostalgic, harking back to an idealised version of England that’s all sun-dappled lanes and grassy churchyards. It’s impossible not to use words like charming and delightful to describe them.

But while the first story was notable for its originality this follow up does feel repetitive at times. Flavia’s hair-raising chemisty experiments, her passion for poisons, the teasing of her elder sisters, the hideous culinary creations of their cook Mrs Mullet – there’s a lot of old ground covered. Also there are some anomalies, out of kilter and unlikely niggly bits (Flavia reads a copy of Australian Women’s Weekly in a London dental surgery for instance) that are surely a result of the author Bradley being not English but a Canadian who’s spent very little time in the country and based the stories on his imaginings.

To be fair part of the joy of Flavia’s adventures is probably their predictability (rather like Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana books). They are the literary equivalent of comfort eating. There is more meat to the mystery in this second book, as well as a deeper sense of sadness and clues there will be trouble brewing in future Flavia books. But essentially what Bradley is offering is a gentle, old-fashioned read. You just have to sink into the story llke a warm bath and enjoy his humour, his turn of phrase and his wonderfully eccentric characters.
Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful author of popular fiction, (The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009 while her latest, Recipe for Life was published by Orion in April, 2010), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above piece was first published on 22 August.