The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a charming mystery novel by Alan Bradley. Set in an English village in 1950, it's narrated by its amateur sleuth, the precocious eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, the third daughter of an absent-minded widower. The result is somewhat as if Miss Marple crossed with Nancy Drew, with an infectious dose of British humor.

Flavia is constantly at odds with her two older sisters. The book opens with her trussed up in the closet, the work of her siblings, but she extricates herself and plots revenge the best way she knows how--chemistry. It seems that Flavia has a passion for the subject, with a full laboratory and a more than passing acquaintance with the periodic table (at one point she corrects a chart hanging in the classroom at a boys' school--but I get ahead of myself). She injects poison ivy into her sister's lipstick, which eventually makes her lips look like a "mandrill's South Pole."

These high jinks are interrupted, though, when two things happen fast upon one another: a dead jack snipe is left on the de Luce's doorstep, a postage stamp impaled on its beak, and then a stranger turns up dead in the cucumber patch. Flavia is there in time to hear his mysterious last word--"Vale."

The inquisitive Flavia is on the case, especially after her father is arrested for the crime. She manages to uncover a plot involving the exceedingly rare Penny Black, the first postage stamp, bearing the likeness of Queen Victoria. In doing this she gets under the feet of Inspector Hewitt, who views her interference with equal parts bemusement and annoyance.

Bradley has created a wonderful voice in Flavia--I understand it's the first in a series. The novel could be fully enjoyed by a juvenile reader (particularly girls into chemistry), but it's equally a pleasure for adults, as Flavia is a terrific companion. I open the book at random and find a typical passage: "Not to too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun."