A little while ago, I asked for recommendations of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Shortly thereafter, I stumbled into Running Girl (20014) by Simon Mason, which is Teenage Sherlock in all but name.

Our teenage sleuth this time around is Garvie Smith, possessor of both a genius level IQ (though, yes, IQ test aren’t an infallible way of determining one’s intelligence…) and an attitude that seems custom-tailored to rile every adult who comes into contact with him: disrespectful, world-weary, impossible to motivate, and often quick to say out loud what others would perhaps recognise should be left unsaid. On the surface, there’s nothing Garvie Smith has to offer anyone, least of all the police who come calling when Chloe Dow, a girl Garvie dated for a few weeks, is found strangled, her body hidden in a local pond.

Next morning Chloe Dow was everywhere, as if she’d been absorbed into the very fabric of the city.

The predictably febrile press attention bestowed on the murder of the blonde, attractive, popular Chloe will particularly be felt by Detective Inspector Raminder Singh, who will find himself under constant pressure from forces both inside and outside of the police. A young, serious, ambitious man keen to make his name by finding the killer, Singh’s first interaction with Garvie will convince him that this wastrel child has little or nothing to offer the investigation. And yet Garvie smith keeps cropping up, making elliptical statements, apparently on the same quest as Singh even if they do keep getting in each other’s way.

“You’re trying to work out who killed Chloe Dow?”

Garvie shook his head in exasperation. “No! I’m trying to work out who stole her running shoes.”

Of course, what’s going to happen is that Singh comes to appreciate the value of Garvie’s intelligence, the two of them starting a reluctant partnership that sees them bring out the best in each other and eventually win the day…and so Mason is to be commended for how realistically he handles this, with the boy and the man each responsible for how long they’re kept apart. That Garvie views everyone outside his circle of friends with disdain — adults in particular — both stymies the progress they could make and feeds into the realistic nature of this. The police aren’t going to run to a 15 year-old for help, after all, and so Garvie will have to investigate on his own for the overwhelming majority of this.

The Holmes comparisons are writ pretty large: Garvie has a trusted coterie of friends who supply information and skills not unlike the Irregulars, he smokes weed as a way to alleviate the boredom that has enveloped him, and the lightning-fast insights that drive much of his reasoning apes the methods of Conan Doyle’s titan. And, perhaps unintentionally, there’s the additional comparison in that some of what Garvie reasons out is spurious at best and, of course, turns out to be bang on the money: the party responsible for stealing those shoes, for one, and much of the thinking that holds together the closing, revelatory stages of this. It feels like Mason was perhaps inspired to try something akin to a real world version of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, and has found a way to play with that which doesn’t breach any copyrights.

And, hey, why not? At least it’s not set in some elite boarding school, like just about every other mystery of this sort these days. And Mason writes well, too, capturing the atmosphere of the casino, full of “the standard low-grade hubbub of people enjoying losing money”, or occasionally switching to script-like layouts whenever an interview — formal or otherwise — its taking place:

GARVIE’S MUM: How much [weed] are you smoking? If I walk into your room now, how much of that stuff am I going to find?

GARVIE SMITH: I really hope none of it.

I also love how well Mason captures the broken down nature of Garvie’s world, like when he writes about him wearing a pair of “nearly genuine Ray Bans”, which perfectly elucidates so much about the boy and the people he is surrounded by. And yet he’s not beyond reaching: something about the murder of Chloe Dow really does affect him, his realisation of what his actions are doing to his mother is superbly rendered, and when he and Singh finally put their mutual animosity aside there’s something akin to meaning suddenly imbued in Garvie’s life: all it took was someone treating him seriously…a turn of events that was, undeniably, delayed by his own poor choices.

As a mystery, I’m less enamoured of Running Girl. Its realistic focus results in slow progress, and the reasoning that drives it doesn’t really hold together as rigorously as you’re supposed to believe — whomst among us has purchased our clothes so that they all match with every other item in our wardrobe? The answers to the murder, too, require a few sweeps that don’t quite get appropriately explained, and when you compare it to the excellent reasoning in the likes of the Funjungle books by Stuart Gibbs or Sharna Jackson’s debut — both of these written for an ostensibly younger audience — it feels a little…under-developed.

The characters are what compel here, and it’s the characters that might yet bring me back to this trilogy. My interest remains more squarely fixed on mysteries for younger readers that impress by their clever reasoning and clear lines of thinking, but I like Garvie Smith, and I’m intrigued to see what happens to him from here.

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The Garvie Smith trilogy by Simon Mason: