The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

A week or so back the Metro had a smallish profile on this book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, which was highly positive, so I gave it a look. As a very quick aside, reading it before the start of a comedy show, my buddy and his mom had both heard of this book and were interested in what I thought about it. It was all very "literary society", I liked it.

Anyways, the book, yeah, it's the first of a series, but I have no desire to keep reading. Though I dislike labelling something "children's" or "teen" fiction- if it's well written, it's well written!- however, this story is way too simple, there isn't really any growth on the part of the female protagonist, and the star is an eleven year old girl.

Working against the notion of it being a kids book, the abundant use of chemistry terms would likely go over kids heads (then again, it would give them something to look up, which I'm all in favour of) and the thing is 373 pages long. Sure, the print is big, and it's not like length has ever stopped a Harry Potter fan, so maybe I'm grasping at straws on that one.

The book gets a great deal of praise for the main character, Flavia de Luce, 11 year old chemistry prodigy living in 1950's England. She certainly is precocious... too much so. She doesn't really sound at all like an 11 year old girl. It's almost like her age was an arbitrary choice to extend the length of her series, matching up with the moderately successful Harry Potter books. Oh, you've heard of him, have you?

The mystery revolves around who killed a guy Flavia finds out in their cucumber patch. Except, and this is what really kills this book for me, there was no physical indication the guy was murdered at all! She just finds the guy, he hasn't even completely died yet, he gets a last word out ("Vale!" apparently latin for "farewell") and Bob's your uncle, he must have been murdered. Forget that there's no blood, no wound- during the course of her investigations she even finds the guy is a diabetic and that he'd snatched a piece of pie from the windowsill. She never even seems to entertain the notion that the guy killed himself by slipping into a diabetic coma.

The police immediately treat it as murder as well, LONG before they're told of the actual means of execution which would certainly have slipped under their noses. Why? Perhaps theirs is an unnaturally busy police force: "Lieutenant, old old old old man Jenkins died last night!"

"Better arrest the neighbor, it's a well known fact that they'd been feuding for years!"

"We can't, sir!"

"Why not?"

"The neighbor died last month!"

"Another criminal gets away. Let that be a lesson to you- eternal vigilance!"

To be clear, the above exchange is my own silly invention, and not a part of the book here, but I think it illustrates my problem. The old 'reductio ad absurdem' trick.

Alan Bradley is a first time mystery novelist- and he's gone out the gate at 70 years old (or thereabouts), so I'd have been much inclined to cut the guy some slack. Good for him and all that! Until I re-read the bio at the back: "Prior to taking early retirement to write in 1994, he was director of television engineering at the University of Saskatchewan media center for twenty-five years. His versatility has earned him awards for his children's books, radio broadcasts of his short stories, and national print for his journalism. He also co-authored Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, to great acclaim and much controversy, followed by a poignant memoir, The Shoebox Bible. In 2007, Bradley won the Debut Dagger Award of the Crimewriter's Association for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the first book in a new series featuring the brilliant young British sleuth Flavia de Luce."

This is not a man just starting out at a writing career, this is someone well placed to take advantage of a lifetime of contacts to get a book published. Which is fine, I don't necessarily begrudge him that, but I do think this book should have been better considering his experience and the accolades of this Crimewriter's Association.