The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

"I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult.  It has been my experience that facetiousness in the mouth of someone old enough to know better is often no more than camouflage for something far, far worse."  (17)

Frog's wha'?  Well, technically it means foundation or basis of something (fundamental, right?), but if you look not very hard you can find that it refers to an anatomical foundation.  So to be precise, Our Heroine in Alan Bradley's The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag (2010, this edition Bantam, 2011) is saying, rawther Britishly, that she doesn't give a rat's ass for grown-up double-speak.

That's Flavia de Luce for you:  well-spoken, unfailingly polite, insatiably curious, yet with an underlying wariness born of a lonely existence in a upper-crust British family.  If you read the first installment in this charming series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the opening scene here, wherein Flavia magnificently imagines her death and the ensuing ceremony and grief, will come as no surprise.  It is the bitter yet funny imagining of a precocious child whose closest confident is the groundsman-cum-butler and whose refuge is an antique chemistry lab in an unused wing of the crumbling family manse.  Flave, as she refers to herself at times, roams the countryside and local village on her trusty bicycle steed, Gladys, a constant reminder of her dimly remembered but nonetheless worshipped deceased mother.  An excess of intelligence and fertile imagination mean that she is always wherever interesting things happen, especially if murder or other nefarious activities are involved.

A suspect-in-the-way-that-itinerant-artists-are, yet enormously entertaining travelling puppet show has come to the charming willage of Bishop's Lacey.  It has the requisite suspicious characters - the talented yet deformed maestro who literally pulls the strings, his charming but maybe troubled assistant - and beautifully carved if disturbingly real puppets.  Someone ends up dead, and some locals with troubled pasts might be involved, and it might just be connected to the tragic death of a child some years earlier.  There are some weak red herrings, especially the dashing former German POW and his backstory which seems to take up several pages in the middle of the story and serves no purpose as far as I can tell other than to provide Flavia's sister Ophelia with someone to moon over.

That doesn't really matter, however, as I find that I don't particularly care about who killed whom.  It's the central plot element of course but what I really like about this series is the very Britishness of it all - and the gentle skewering thereof.  We have hopelessly stratified society, from Flavia's fake "prunes-and-prisms" voice that she puts on when necessary (194) to "the Spurlings [one named Bunny, natch] of Nautilus Old Hall, who, as Father once remarked, had gone to the dogs by way of the horses."  (181)  And the redoubtable Aunt Felicity*, down from London for a visit.
  "'London?' Aunt Felicity said.  'London is always the same, all soot and pigeons and Clement Atlee.  Just one damnable deprivation after another.  They ought to have men with nets to capture those children one sees in Kensington and train them to run the power plants at Battersea and Bankside.  With a better class of people at the switches mightn't go off so frequently."  (102)

We also queue, of course, especially to say good morning to the vicar after church on Sunday, as did Dogger and Aunt Felicity, "penned up somewhere in the vestibule, queueing like crewmen on a sunken submarine, waiting for their turn at the escape hatch." (181) And, we have creaky old houses that make one pause and ponder.  "At Buckshaw, time does not pass as it does in other places.  At Buckshaw, time seems to be controlled not by those frantic, scurrying little cogs in the hall clock that spin like hamsters in their shuttered cages, but rather by the solemn great gears that manage to creep through just one complete turn each year."  Here you see Flavia's marvelous imagination, her underlying desperation at her lonely situation, and yet I think also a certain devotion to it.  She is a de Luce, and de Luces live in slow houses like Buckshaw, that is how it is.

Finally we have noble family retainers (Dogger) and blissfully unaware ones like housekeeper-cook Mrs. Mullet.  The de Luces, for all their ancient lineage, have actually fallen on hard times financially - this story in particular includes vague references to some financial disaster that Father may have brought upon the household - so they are limited in the resources they can devote to high living.  Mrs. Mullet will have to do.  And does she ever, as this lengthy excerpt delightfully demonstrates.
  "'The Whiffler,' as we called it, was a dessert of Mrs. Mullet's own devising, which, so far as we could make out, consisted of a sort of clotted green jelly in sausage casings, topped with double Devon cream, and garnished with sprigs of mint and other assorted vegetable refuse.  It sat there, quivering obscenely now and then, like some great beastly garden slug."  (45)

British girls always use the word beastly at some point.

*I was quite pleased to see Aunt Felicity throw Flavia a lifeline in a brief but important conversation about her mother, her inspirations, and her aspirations.  Will she be something of a mentor in future installments?

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

You may not think that as august a personage as the Dean of Harvard College is a fan of mysteries, but he is, and so we have him to thank for directing us to Allan Bradley's Flavia de Luce series.  The word quirky has been a bit over-used by student scribes this year with respect to the aforementioned Dean, but in this instance it is spot-on Bradley's first book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Bantam, 2010).

The narrator, and Our Heroine, is a precocious 11 year old, living in a seen-better-days grand British country house.  Her father is predictably distant (being British, after all, and a widower), her older sisters are self-absorbed, and there are a couple of (also predictably) loyal retainers who keep the place and the family more or less going.  Left to her own devices, and with access to a big library and an unusually well-equipped private laboratory, Flavia has developed a particular interest in chemistry, and more specifically, the use of poisons.  When she finds a man dying in the cucumber patch, her imagination takes flight, but when her father is fingered for the crime, she now has a cause.  Riding a bicycle named Gladys and deploying an astonishing knowledge of the local landscape, Flavia charges around putting all sort of stories and clues and bits together and more or less solving both the murder and a few other problems on the way.

Our Flavia is a kind of a mid-century British Harriet the Spy. She even has a notebook, in which she records the results of experiments, etc.  Unlike Harriet, she doesn't get in trouble because of her observations, mostly because no one is paying attention.  But that's not to say that she doesn't, how shall we say, critique her fellow man:
  "'And how may I help you, dearie?'
  If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as 'dearie.'  When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poisons, and come to 'Cyanide,' I am going to put under 'Uses' the phrase 'Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.'"  (62)
Ah, the British education system, that produces tweens who can properly use the word efficacious.   If Flavia de Luce is not careful she will grow up to be Arthur Bryant.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is definitely a book for Anglophiles although amazingly, the author had never visited England before he won an award there for this book!  (380)  He's Canadian, though, and apparently feels British.  "Eat your sandwiches, dear," says Mrs. Mullet, the housekeeper to Flavia.  "There's nothing like cold meats in June - they're as good as a picnic."  (78)  Cold meats - how marvelously Jane Austen.  And of course Buckshaw, the ancient family seat of the de Luces, had me at the broad stone staircase and the "pustulantly Victorian" east and west wings.  (7)  House envy has rescued many an otherwise dull story for me, but this time the story lives up to the promise offered by the pile, artificial lake, folly, and all.  The whole tale takes place in June, one of the best months in England, when the promise of summer is still unfulfilled.  "When I opened my eyes, an oyster-colored dawn was peeping in at my windows.  The hands of my brass alarm clock stood at 3:44.  On Summer Time, daylight came early, and less than a quarter of an hour, the sun should be up."  (26)  I don't know that you'd ever see an oyster-colored dawn anywhere but on that scepter'd isle.

The Sweetness was a fun and quick read, and I'll definitely continue through this series.  Although I confess I'd not have picked up this book on my own.  Seriously, who reads books with pre-teen protagonists?  The Dean of Harvard College, apparently!  I guess they are pretty smart there, after all.