The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (39 page)

“Sure to be,” Dogger said. “Things don’t change as quickly in royal circles as they do in yours and mine, nor should they.”

The drawing room was empty. Daffy and Feely were off somewhere, most likely planning their next attack.

I found a decent sheet of writing paper in a drawer, and then, dipping the pen in the inkwell, I copied out the salutation from Mrs. Mullet’s greasy book, trying to make my handwriting as neat as possible:

Most Gracious Sovereign:

May it please Your Majesty
,

Please find enclosed an item of considerable value belonging to Your Majesty which was stolen earlier this year. How it fell into my hands (a nice touch, I thought) is unimportant, but I can assure Your Majesty that the criminal has been caught.

“Apprehended,” Dogger said, reading over my shoulder.

I changed it.

“What else?”

“Nothing,” Dogger said. “Just sign it. Kings prefer brevity.”

Being careful not to blot the page, I copied the closing from the book:

I remain, with the profoundest veneration, Your Majesty’s most faithful subject and dutiful servant.

Flavia de Luce (Miss)

“Perfect!” Dogger said.

I folded the letter neatly, making an extra-sharp crease with my thumb. I slipped it into one of Father’s best envelopes and wrote the address:

His Royal Highness King George the Sixth
Buckingham Palace, London, SWI
England

“Shall I mark it Personal?”

“Good idea,” Dogger said.

A week later, I was cooling my bare feet in the waters of the artificial lake, revising my notes on coniine, the chief alkaloid in poison hemlock, when Dogger appeared suddenly, waving something in his hand.

“Miss Flavia!” he called, and then he waded across to the island, boots and all.

His trouser legs were soaking wet, and although he stood there dripping like Poseidon, his grin was as bright as the summer afternoon.

He handed me an envelope that was as soft and white as goose down.

“Shall I open it?” I asked.

“I believe it’s addressed to you.”

Dogger winced as I tore open the flap and pulled out the single sheet of creamy paper which lay folded inside:

My Dear Miss de Luce
,

I am most grateful to you for your recent communication and for the restoration of the splendid item contained therein, which has, as you must know, played a remarkable part, not only in the history of my own family, but in the history of England.

Please accept my heartfelt thanks.

And it was signed simply “George.”

For Shirley

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Whenever I pick up a new book, I always turn to the acknowledgments first because they provide me with a sort of aerial photograph of the work: a large-scale map that shows something of the wider environment in which the book was written, where it has been, and how it came to be.

No work-in-progress was ever more kindly nurtured than
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
, and it gives me tremendous pleasure to express my gratitude to the Crime Writers’ Association and the panel of judges who chose the book for the Debut Dagger Award: Philip Gooden, chair of the CWA; Margaret Murphy; Emma Hargrave; Bill Massey; Sara Menguc; Keshini Naidoo; and Sarah Turner.

Additional and special thanks are due to Margaret Murphy, who not only chaired the Debut Dagger Awards Committee, but also stole time from her own hectic schedule on awards day to personally welcome a wandering alien to London.

To Meg Gardiner, Chris High, and Ann Cleeves for making me feel as if I’d known them all my life.

To Louise Penny, a Dagger winner herself, whose warm generosity and encouragement is exemplified in the beacon her website has become for aspiring writers. Louise truly knows how to “give back” for the things she has received. Besides that, her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels are simply terrific!

To my agent, Denise Bukowski, for flying the Atlantic to be there and, in spite of my jet lag, for getting me to the church on time.

Again, to Bill Massey, of Orion Books, who had faith enough to buy the novel—and the series—on the strength of that first handful of pages, and for treating me to a memorable lunch at the onetime Bucket of Blood, in Covent Garden, the very spot where the poet and critic John Dryden was set upon by ruffians in a passageway. No one has ever been blessed with a better editor than Bill. He is truly a kindred spirit!

To Kate Miciak and Molly Boyle, of Bantam Dell in New York, and Kristin Cochrane of Doubleday Canada, for their early faith and encouragement.

Special thanks to Janet Cooke, vice president, director of sales, the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, whose enthusiasm has contributed so much to the world of Flavia de Luce.

To Robyn Karney and Connie Munro, copy editors at Orion Books and at Bantam Dell, respectively, for their excellent and perceptive suggestions. And to Emma Wallace and Genevieve Pegg, also at Orion Books, for their enthusiastic and friendly welcome.

To the helpful and friendly staff of the British Postal Museum and Archive, at Freeling House, Phoenix Place, London, for so cheerfully answering my questions and allowing me access to materials in their care relating to the history of the Penny Black.

To my longtime Saskatoon friends and connoisseurs of crime, Mary Gilliland and Allan and Janice Cushon for putting into my hands the Edwardian equivalent of the Internet: a complete set of the eleventh edition (1911) of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, which must surely be every detective novelist’s dream.

To David Whiteside, of the Bukowski Agency, for his yeoman work in bringing order to the necessary mountains of paperwork and red tape.

To my dear friends Dr. John and Janet Harland, who were there at every step along the way with many useful and often brilliant suggestions. Without their enthusiasm,
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
would have been a lesser book and much less fun to write.

All of these kind people have given me their best advice; if any mistakes have crept in, they are mine alone.

And finally, with love and eternal thanks to my wife, Shirley, who urged me—no, insisted that I allow Flavia and the de Luce family to emerge from the bundle of notes in which they had been languishing for far too long.

The
Sweetness
at the
Bottom
of the
Pie

ALAN BRADLEY

A Reader’s Guide

A Conversation with
Alan Bradley

Random House:
With the publication of
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
, you’ve become a seventy-year-old first-time novelist. Have you always had a passion for writing—or is it more of a recent development?

Alan Bradley:
Well, the Roman author Seneca once said something like this: “Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms—you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.” So to put it briefly, I’m taking his advice.

I actually spent most of my life working on the technical side of television production, but would like to think that I’ve always been a writer. I started writing a novel at age five and have written articles for various publications all my life. It wasn’t until my early retirement, though, that I started writing books. I published my memoir,
The Shoebox Bible
, in 2004, and then started working on a mystery about a reporter in England. It was during the writing of this story that I stumbled across Flavia de Luce, the main character in
Sweetness
.

RH:
Flavia certainly is an interesting character. How did you come up with such a forceful, precocious, and entertaining personality?

AB:
Flavia walked onto the pages of another book I was writing, and simply hijacked the story. I was actually well into this other book—about three or four chapters—and as I introduced a main character, a detective, there was a point where he was required to go to a country house and interview this colonel.

I got the detective up to the driveway and there was this girl sitting on a camp stool doing something with a notebook and a pencil. He stopped and asked her what she was doing and she said, “Writing down license plate numbers,” and he said, “Well, there can’t be many in such a place,” and she said, “Well, I have yours, don’t I?” I came to a stop. I had no idea who this girl was and where she came from.

She just materialized. I can’t take any credit for Flavia at all. I’ve never had a character who came that much to life. I’ve had characters that tend to tell you what to do, but Flavia grabbed the controls on page one. She sprang full-blown with all of her attributes—her passion for poison, her father and his history—all in one package. It surprised me.

RH:
There aren’t many adult books that feature child narrators. Why did you want Flavia to be the voice of this novel?

AB:
People probably wonder, “What’s a seventy-year-old-man doing writing about an eleven-year-old-girl in 1950s England?” And it’s a fair question. To me, Flavia em bodies that kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything—absolutely anything!—is within our capabilities.

I think the reason she manifested herself as a young girl is that I realized that it would really be a lot of fun to have somebody who was virtually invisible in a village. And, of course, we don’t listen to what children say—they’re always asking questions, and nobody pays the slightest attention or thinks for a minute that children are going to do anything with the information that adults let slip. I wanted Flavia to take great advantage of that. I was also intrigued by the possibilities of dealing with an unreliable narrator, one whose motives were not always on the up-and-up.

She is an amalgam of burning enthusiasm, curiosity, energy, youthful idealism, and frightening fearlessness. She’s also a very real menace to anyone who thwarts her, but fortunately, they don’t generally realize it.

RH:
Like Flavia, you were eleven years old in 1950. Is there anything autobiographical about her character?

AB:
Somebody pointed out the fact that both Flavia and I lacked a parent. But I wasn’t aware of this connection during the writing of the book. It simply didn’t cross my mind. It is true that I grew up in a home with only one parent, and I was allowed to run pretty well free, to do the kinds of things I wanted. And I did have extremely intense interests then—things that you get focused on. When you’re that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me—that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.

RH:
Your story evokes such a vivid setting. Had you spent much time in the British countryside before writing this book?

AB:
My first trip to England didn’t come until I went to London to receive the 2007 Debut Dagger Award, so I had never even stepped foot in the country at the time of writing
Sweetness
. But I have always loved England. My mother was born there. And I’ve always felt I grew up in a very English household. I had always wanted to go and had dreamed for many years of doing so.

When I finally made it there, the England that I was seeing with my eyes was quite unlike the England I had imagined, and yet it was the same. I realized that the differences were precisely those differences between real life and the simulation of real life that we create in our detective novels. So this was an opportunity to create on the page this England that had been in my head my whole life.

RH:
You have five more books lined up in this series, all coming from Delacorte Press. Will Flavia age as the series goes on?

AB:
A bit, not very much. I think she’s going to remain in the same age bracket. I don’t really like the idea of Flavia as an older teenager. At her current age, she is such a concoction of contradictions. It’s one of the things that I very much love about her. She’s eleven but she has the wisdom of an adult. She knows everything about chemistry but nothing about family relationships.

I don’t think she’d be the same person if she were a few years older. She certainly wouldn’t have access to the drawing rooms of the village.

RH:
Do you have a sense of what the next books in the series will be about?

AB:
The second book,
The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag
, is finished, and I’m working on the third book. I have a general idea of what’s happening in each of them, because I wanted to focus on some bygone aspect of British life that was still there in the fifties but has now vanished. So we have postage stamps in the first one… The second book is about the traveling puppet shows on the village green. And one of them is about filmmaking—it sort of harks back to the days of the classic Ealing comedies with Alec Guinness and so forth.

RH:
Not every author garners such immediate success with a first novel. After completing only fifteen pages of
Sweetness
, you won the Dagger award and within eight days had secured book deals in three countries. You’ve since secured twenty-eight countries. Enthusiasm continues to grow from every angle. How does it feel?