This is by Alan Bradley (1938-2026), and it was published in 2009.

I'd never heard of this author until I saw him mentioned in Boze's Eighty-Five Favorite Books of All Time, one of those Substack book posts that the algorithm knows I'm ineluctably drawn to. Boze mentioned the Flavia de Luce series, which is set in an English village in the early 1950s: "Flavia has two older siblings (whom she finds deeply annoying) and a frankly unnerving knowledge of chemistry, which she uses to solve crimes. The real glory of the series is her narrative voice, equal parts brash, put-upon and endearing."

I'm always a little put out when I've never heard of an author who's included in a reasonably sensible list, so I did what we all now automatically do: Looked him up.

And -- what do you know? -- he'd just died. Literally just died. Mere days before I went looking for him. And where had he died? In Peel, on the Isle of Man. Where he'd lived for more than a decade.


Peel, May 2026

***

Sweetness is the first in the Flavia de Luce series, and I generally like to start at the beginning of something. So I scurried off to the award-winning Douglas Library (well, it has won my award, anyway) to bag myself a copy.

It's Bradley's first novel; he was over 70 when it was published; and it became an instant success, winning several notable prizes. It describes how Flavia, by being awfully bright and plucky, manages to ferret out not only the identity of the prone man who expired right in front of her in the garden early one morning (not long after she'd overheard a quarrel between the victim and her father), but also the reason he died, and the man who killed him. (There's more detail about the plot, spoiler-free, here.)

There's absolutely nothing about this scenario that should work...

1. A septuagenarian Canadian man is writing from the point of view of an 11-year-old English girl.
2. He's writing about an English village, although (as he tells us in the afterword) he didn't set foot in England until he was 69, when he flew to London to accept the Debut Dagger Award.
3. He's writing about the 1950s, for most of which decade he himself was only in his teens.



That it does actually work is testimony to two factors:

1. The author's ability to create a world. It doesn't, after all, have to be a real world...

As Bradley explains in that afterword, his forebears came from England. His grandfather, who ran away to sea when he was about nine, and didn't return for years, later served in the armed forces in various parts of the world. And then he emigrated to Canada. He spent his latter years immobile because of illness, but he passed on to his grandson story after story about his adventures all over the globe. Mostly, though, he talked about England:

"My grandparents' house," says Bradley, "literally overflowed with English books and magazines... I became hooked on England: I simply devoured books on English history, English railways, English geography, English architecture, English humour. I pored over maps of London, tracing the streets with my jammy fingers. Since I was not able to go there, I began creating, in my mind, my own private England; not, perhaps, as it was in reality, but as it should have been...

"The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie grew out of my longings for the English countryside. It's the kind of detective novel I'd like to stumble across myself: a 1950s village, a church with its own encrypted saint, a forgetful vicar, a crumbling country house, a Victorian chemistry laboratory, wicked sisters, an absent father, a precocious (and perhaps unreliable) female narrator in pigtails -- and poisons galore!"

So the world of Sweetness is a world of little shops selling things like pear drops, public schools with philately clubs, and custard tarts made by the housekeeper. It sometimes feels a tiny bit anachronistic, but you just don't feel the need to quarrel...



2. The author's ability to create a likeable character.

OK, no-one is EVER going to come across an 11-year-old like Flavia. She's full of confidence and curiosity, and she's scarily intelligent. She has commandeered the chemistry lab left behind in their distinctly Gothic family home by a renegade ancestor, and she absolutely knows what to do with it. But Flavia is also vulnerable. She, alone of all the sisters, has no memory of her mother (who died in a mountain climbing accident). Her sisters (Ophelia the Vain, and Daphne the Bookworm) are horrible to her (when we first meet poor Flavia, she's figuring out how to escape the cupboard they've locked her in). And her father is a man broken by grief, and mostly concerned with his stamp collection. So she's a distinctly lonely child, and her best friend is Dogger, who had terrible experiences as a Japanese prisoner of war, and is now Col de Luce's general factotum.

Somehow, Bradley makes you invest in Flavia, whose jaunty air is often a cover for pain.

As he said in an interview: "There is a sense of wonder I can remember from being 11. You are absolutely invincible. It's that age where you think that you can build a glider out of bed sheets and jump off the castle wall and you won't get hurt. You can do anything."

What Bradley has succeeded in doing is allowing us, as adults, to enjoy the kind of heroes we loved in the comics we read as youngsters.



***

I guess this book didn't benefit from having been read so soon after Shirley Jackson's very sophisticated We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There we have another weird home, another dysfunctional family, and another young person with a penchant for poison -- all wrapped up in a much more serious package.

Still, Sweetness was entertaining. Definitely a good read, and I would certainly follow Flavia a bit further down her quirky road.

She has been extraordinarily popular: The series now comprises 11 books; sales weigh in at over six million copies, with translations into 36 languages. One final posthumous instalment of Flavia is due to appear in November, and there's a movie adaptation of Sweetness in the pipeline as well.

Flavia has also been influential. Bradley commented in 2024: "I've just been absolutely flattened by letters and emails from girls of Flavia’s age who have said that they’ve decided to go into science. Now that the first book has been out for 16 years, I’m beginning to hear from girls who graduated, who are now very advanced in science. I think that’s a wonderful achievement, inspiring young people to go into the sciences."

To close, what's with the cryptic book title? According to the epigraph, it comes from William King's The Art of Cookery (1708): "Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie, who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?" I presume that boils down to an injunction to dig down to the root of things, without being distracted by the fripperies. Or maybe it also refers to Flavia, who is sweetly loyal to her father and Dogger, despite all the outward crustiness.

***

Rest in peace, Mr Bradley. You sound as though you were a great guy.