At Monday’s event there was a hinted suggestion that maybe you can’t have crime for children. I didn’t exclaim ‘what rot!’ but they were wrong. You can, and you do, have crime novels for young readers. As with other books, some adult themes will have been missed out, but dead bodies are not necessarily one of them. Children can cope just fine.
I didn’t mention that I was reading a young crime book at that very moment, or that the young detectives actually had a fight with the policeman about being allowed to draw the chalk line round the body. I have to add here that Christopher William Hill’s Bleakley Brothers mystery, What Manor of Murder? is perhaps a little unrealistic. It’s set in the 1930s (I think) and quite posh in a modern, fake sort of way.
Twins Eustace and Horatio Bleakley are on their way to spend Michaelmas with their aunt and uncle at Bleakley Manor, in the company of a Poor Unfortunate, aka an orphan by the name of Master Oliver Davenport, and their cousin Loveday. Before long there are two corpses that have to be accommodated – quite literally – and the mystery of their demise needs to be solved. Who can they trust?
Very few tears are shed over the dead people, who weren’t terribly popular anyway. This is probably rather unlikely, even in these wealthy circumstances. And the boys speak a somewhat exaggerated English, the way writers nowadays [might] believe posh people once spoke. But it’s quite fun.
(I just hope the boys grew up into decent men, because if not, I’ve just gone off the whole trend of this kind of thing. It’s only charming up to a point.)
