Young Agatha Christie rides again

Two more middle grade mysteries starring Aggie Morton

Hi, friends,

Thanks for bearing with me as I continue to tinker with the format of this newsletter & the types of things I want to share! Let me know if you have thoughts.

We’ve just come out of a monstrous heat wave—or, well, monstrous for those of us in Maine who aren’t used to upper-90s temps during the day, let alone at night—so I’m looking forward to venturing outside for some good, long walks this week, instead of sitting in a dark room planted in front of a fan and moaning.

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Book covers: Peril at Owl Park and The Dead Man in the Garden, both written by Marthe Jocelyn and illustrated by Isabelle Follath

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“I find it particularly suspicious,” I said, “that he died right after a telephone call that required him to rush out into the night for an accident that had not happened! I think we’ve stumbled across another murder. Do you not agree?”

“You mustn’t get your hopes up, Agatha dear,” said Grannie Jane.

Too late for that!

—Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: The Dead Man in the Garden

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Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: Peril at Owl Park
Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: The Dead Man in the Garden
Both written by Marthe Jocelyn and illustrated by Isabelle Follath

I was somewhat lukewarm on the first book in this series, but the premise—a fictionalized version of twelve-year-old Agatha Christie solves mysteries with her Belgian friend Hector and an assist from her Grannie Jane—is so up my alley that I wanted to give it another chance. And I’m so happy I did, because I very much enjoyed Peril at Owl Park, and I flat-out loved The Dead Man in the Garden.

Peril at Owl Park involves being snowed in at a manor house with a thief (and maybe a murderer!) at Christmas; The Dead Man in the Garden is set at a hotel/spa in Yorkshire where TWO suspicious deaths occur in a short span of time. Both feature lots of Easter eggs for Christie fans—I caught references to Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, Christie’s weekend disappearance, Miss Lemon, and others—and bonus: the plot of Peril at Owl Park will be familiar to fans of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Jocelyn clearly does tons of research for these—bless her, she includes a list of sources—and she flawlessly weaves in historical facts, giving modern readers the information they need without being too obvious about it.

In both books, Jocelyn walks the tough line of a historical in that she shows some characters indulging in era-realistic garbage attitudes about race, nationality, disability, and so on, but she always includes disapproval from other characters (sometimes silent, sometimes verbalized). There are, though, undercurrents of fatphobia throughout—with no pushback—from Aggie, in that when she describes a fat person, it is usually with a clearly negative spin, or sometimes she seems to be playing it for “humor”? That’s realistic for the era, probably, but given that there’s pushback on all other fronts, that felt particularly glaring and unfortunate.

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My heart sank with the inevitability of trouble. At the same time, it expanded with a burst of anticipation, almost glee.

—Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: The Dead Man in the Garden

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In terms of the actual investigations, in The Dead Man in the Garden in particular, our young sleuths go full process-y, with notes taken and theories discussed and motives considered. They have to find ways to sneakily question adults—the moment an adult starts to realize that Aggie and Hector are pumping them for information, they clam up and/or yell at them—which results in a whole lot of smirking on the part of the reader. (Or on the part of this reader, at any rate.)

I think what I particularly liked about The Dead Man in the Garden is that it dealt with Aggie’s mixed feelings about the victim—she hadn’t particularly liked him, partly because he was a bit of a jerk, partly because he was clearly having some romantical feelings about her widowed mother that Aggie wasn’t ready to contend with. Christie’s books so often feature unlikable victims—after all, the worse they are, the more motives for murder and the more suspects to question—but regardless of the likability of the victim, murder is murder, a mystery to be solved.

There’s also a nice thread that comes about due to her interactions with Miss Napoli—the daughter of the local undertaker and his assistant. Aggie realizes that as much as she adores her mother, as much as she would never, ever want to lose her—especially given her continuing grief over losing her father—that her mother’s more traditional/conservative beliefs about propriety may prove a future hindrance in re: Aggie pursuing her interests:

Surely Miss Napoli did not mean she was happier without a mother . . . but . . . my gaze fell again upon the bulky form of Mr. Hart beneath the sheet. If I were to report to Mummy the details of this room, of this visit? I do believe she’d faint. And here, Miss Napoli, a motherless daughter, had turned a Morbid Preoccupation into a lifelong pursuit!

Which is a really Big Growing-Up Moment, starting to see those shades of gray in life. It must be noted, too, that Aggie shares my love of Dramatic Capitals, which—Certain Politicians aside—always endears me to a narrator. The books also include newspaper articles—happily, the intrepid journalist Mr. Fibbley appears in all three books—letters, and other documents, which I also always love.

So, overall, I’m really really happy that I stuck with this series! I’ll be reading the fourth book the moment it drops (if not sooner, if I can snag an early copy from the publisher).

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“Better than a music hall,” murmured Grannie Jane.

“I dare not breathe,” said Hector, “in case I miss a word.”

—Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: The Dead Man in the Garden

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Peril at Owl Park

Amazon

The Dead Man in the Garden

Amazon | Bookshop

The Seaside Corpse

Amazon | Bookshop

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Previously:

Two girl sleuths named Agatha and an endlessly shirtless punching detective

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Poster and two images from the 1988 production of Appointment with Death, directed by Michael Winner

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Watching:

Appointment with Death (Michael Winner, 1988)
Streaming on Tubi

Oh my god, friends, it’s such a stinker. Not even Piper Laurie, Lauren Bacall, Hayley Mills, and Carrie Fisher could save it. Peter Ustinov is borderline clownish as Poirot here—which, and I’ve watched all of his Poirot movies now, is NOT usually the case. And there are some line readings from some of the secondary male characters that are… woo boy, they are bad.

Is that going to stop me from re-watching it at some point on a rainy Sunday afternoon? Not at all. But at least I’ll know what I’m in for, yeesh.

(And no matter how bad it is, I’m always here for Piper Laurie and Lauren Bacall being monsters. No one can do Exasperated Bellowing like Piper Laurie, and no one can do Obnoxiously American like Lauren Bacall.)

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And that, as they say, is that?

Talk to you next week, if not sooner,
Leila