On one hand, the artwork promoting The Detention Detectives (2023) by Lis Jardine is excessively twee, even by the standards of juvenile fiction; on the other, the author bio mentions that her life has “been shaped by a fierce passion for…Golden Age crime”. Thus, recalling that adage about books and covers, I ventured forth.

Jonathan ‘Jonno’ Archer has recently moved to Bristol through a combination of his undertaker father getting a promotion and the opportunity to move into a house left to his family by his Nan. He is, perhaps not unpredictably, unhappy after two weeks at his new school, Hanbridge High, and so the strangling to death of P.E. teacher Mr. Baynton presents him with a unique opportunity: if he investigates the murder, hopefully he’ll get in so much trouble that his parents will be left with no option but to pull him out of school and return ‘home’ where he was happier.

As motivations go, it’s an interesting one — not least because it is so at odds with the reasons two other students at the school want to look into the murder. Daniel Horsefell, living with his ill mother, wants to clear the name of Lois Baynton, who acts as a carer but immediately comes under suspicion given her prickly recent past with her husband. And Lydia Strong is simply eager to prove her mettle as a journalist, hoping to made editor of the school paper on the strength of the story she uncovers. So this disparate band of friendless kids are pulled together with conflicting aims, hoping that their investigation will have three wildly different outcomes.

The relationship between the three children is easily the most successful part of this book, even if they do feel more like 13 year-olds than the 11 year-olds we’re told they are. Daniel’s deep-rooted fear of being taken from his mother is especially affecting, and the restraint in leaving Lydia’s own loneliness almost unaddressed is well-judged and telling. You know they’re going to start off disliking each other and end up firm friends by the end, but as tropes go there are worse ones to watch play out, and this plays out in a variety of amusing and affecting ways.

Jardine is to be commended, too, for how inaccessible the murder investigation is to our sleuths: the school’s teachers aren’t just going to roll over and answer their questions, and the police officers assigned to the case are obviously going to take a dim view of three pre-teens angling for any involvement. And investigating a murder comes with a variety of complexities: people lie, for one thing, and the motives of adults will at times be all but incomprehensible to the pre-teenage mind (“None of us had a clue what we were doing,” Jonno reflects at one point). It’s unsurprising that most of this book is watching the central trio try to figure out both the boundaries for dealing with other (“I realized it was a seriously personal question as I said it, and tried to swallow the words.”) as well as dealing with adults who have no reason to tell them anything, but such restrictions, and how your juvenile sleuth overcomes them, is meat and drink to this genre.

But, well, the investigative portions of this book are…not exactly successful. Sure, some of this is deliberately down to delightfully childish reasoning (“I just can’t see someone called Miss Law sneaking out of the back of the school to commit terrible crimes…”), but most of the blame lies at the feet of our author. I know one shouldn’t expect true rigour in a book for younger readers, but the likes of Sharna Jackson, M.G. Leonard, Sam Segdman, Stuart Gibbs, and Marthe Jocelyn have recently shown how clever reasoning can be applied for younger minds. Jardine’s approach is instead to take any sign that someone has something in their life which isn’t the murder — that they’re having an affair, say — as an indication that they couldn’t be involved (even though keeping an affair quiet would be an excellent murder motive). Too many plot leaps are made simply because it’s the easy conclusion to draw in the circumstances, and then we move on as if we’ve just established a cast iron fact…very much not the spirit of the Golden Age.

I could go on about this, but it’s easier to point out that at a late point Jonno is amazed that someone would perform a certain action “based on almost no evidence” and…that sums the book up for me. Occasionally it seems that the rules of detective fiction are dimly recalled — “He didn’t give us an alibi or anything…” — but mostly things trundle on because they have to rather than because anything has been established with any certainty. And it’s not as if the kids even solve the murder — they find out who the killer is because that person starts trying to kill them on only the faintest provocation and then conveniently goes off the deep end and confesses when the police arrive to intervene.

I like Jonno as a narrator — “I reckon if you’re in the middle of being told your husband’s dead, you might want a bit of privacy. Daniel clearly didn’t share my sensitive nature.” — and the footnotes throughout are quietly charming (#30 in particular). Each of the central trio certainly feels like a real person, whether expressing themselves through Daniel’s obsession with Star Trek, Jonno’s combative relationship with his parents, or Lydia’s unusual home situation which is hinted at more widely in the closing stages. Equally, those closing stages have an interesting — if, again, unfounded — air of deliberate irresolution about them which, were the investigative portion of the stronger, would make me want to read the sequel when it’s published next year.

Those very new to murder mysteries might find more to enjoy here, especially in unusual character beats like stuttering school bully Tyler Jenkins, but if you’ve read any of the above-named authors — and I highly recommend that you do — then you’ve already seen that better is available out there.