Susie Day:
crime-fighting teams
Let’s Fight Crime
- Together!
I do like a maverick. Kurt Wallander, Sarah Lund. Jackson
Brodie, stumbling about pursued by quotations. Every stoic Dick Francis hero
jockey. But deep down, what I really want from my mystery-solving nonsense is
pals. A team. A found family; a partnership. What’s Starsky without his Hutch?
Julian, Dick and Anne without George and Timmy?
Wells & Wong,
Robin Stevens
Boarding schools! In the 1920s! With crime! This is my
dream series: a clever blend of Girls’ Own children’s classics and Golden Age
mysteries, utterly respectful of their source material while scratching at the
multiple narrow-minded injustices of the era with a very modern fingernail. The
awfulness of Head Detective Daisy and her eager deputy Hazel is a joyous take
on a particular friendship dynamic, and the mysteries are good chewy fun.
The Three
Investigators, Robert Arthur Jr
‘Presented’ by Alfred Hitchcock, Jupiter Jones and his
mates Pete and Bob solve daft cases in the Californian sunshine, with the aid
of a chauffeured car they won in a competition and their secret HQ in a junkyard,
accessed by pressing one particular knot in the wood. The Mystery
of the Stuttering Parrot has a clue that doesn’t make sense in it that
drove my ten-year-old pedantic self into a proper tizzy. But I still reread it
a hundred times.
The Marsh Road
Mysteries, Elen Caldecott
Old friends Piotr, Minnie and Andrew plus the twins Flora
and Sylvie work together - mostly - to solve crime in a small sleepy British
town. Like Wells & Wong, these are a fine blend of familiar cosy tropes and
a clear-sighted take on a harder-edged real world; in Diamonds & Daggers, Piotr’s father is accused of a theft and
the prejudice behind the accusation is plain. Funny, warm and beautifully
written.
The Mystery Squad,
Martin Waddell, illustrated by T McKenna
Long out of print, but if you can find one secondhand, buy
it immediately (then send it to me). Beans and friends solve mysteries by
tracking clues and so do you, Choose Your Own Adventure-style - by spotting
them in the illustrations or figuring them out from the text, and turning to
the right page. Get it wrong and you have to start again! I am longing for
someone to write a contemporary version of these. Wait. Can I write a
contemporary version of these?
Lord Peter Wimsey
& Harriet Vane, Dorothy L Sayers
*sighs* Peter is a titled, monocle-wearing, overeducated fop
with a butler, and I ought to hate him - which is largely what Harriet thinks
too, until he usefully helps her avoid hanging for murder. Sayers’ novels
featuring only Peter are great. Those which feature Harriet too are magical.
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