It is an oft-repeated lament in the halls of Golden Age fandom that, with the authors from that era all being, y’know, dead, we’re always reading a closed set of books. And the wish is to come across some new corpus of work that we can throw ourselves into in the years ahead. Well, it’s not GAD, but with Friday Barnes: Girl Detective (2014) by R.A. Spratt I’ve definitely found a long-running series I can get very excited about.

11 year-old Friday, the unplanned fifth child in the Barnes household, has largely been left to fend for herself while the rest of her genius family were off being wonders in the world of Physics. Mainly this has resulted in Friday reading thousands of books, and acquiring much knowledge if not much social skill.

Normal concerns about whether she would make any friends did not occur to Friday because she had never made any friends, unless you counted long-dead authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë (and her former school psychologist did not).

Her one sympathetic relative is her Uncle Bernie, who babysits her on Thursday evenings and typically works through the details of his cases as a private detective while Friday watches TV.

Surprisingly Friday’s parents did actually own a television. But they had it tuned to receive only the most boring channels –the free ones from the public broadcaster. The first thing Uncle Bernie did was tune in the commercial channels so Friday could watch reality TV shows about housewives needing plastic surgery so they could still be attractive to their teenage gardeners.

When Friday is able to help Uncle Bernie out with one of his cases, and uses the reward money to pays for a place at the prestigious Highcrest Academy, it’s only a matter of time before her obscure knowledge and brilliant reasoning gets her something of a reputation as a sleuth of no small ability.

The book, then, is not so much a traditionally-structured novel as a series of escapades in which Friday solves various problems — the theft of a clock, a mysteriously-vanishing paper, a possible ape-man living in the swamp next to the school — and is in turn the subject of increasing kudos from the student body and an increasing source of vexation to the staff. It is also bloody hilarious.

“Are you threatening me?” asked the Headmaster.

“I wasn’t,” admitted Friday, “but now you’ve given me the idea, it does sound like a good one.”

The tone of this falls somewhere between the self-seriousness of Robin Stevens’ Murder Most Unladylike books and the all-out anarchy of the Montgomery Bonbon books by Alasdair Beckett-King: the problems and the methods adopted by Friday and her equally socially-untrammelled roommate Melanie are taken seriously in the universe, but if you can go two pages without finding a line that makes you snort with the sheer magnificence of its joyously unhinged perspective then you’re going to struggle to understand me if we ever meet in person.

“I like your brother,” said Friday.

“Yes,” agreed Melanie. “He’s just like a big puppy. Except you don’t have to clean up his poop or take him for walks.”

Let’s be clear: these are not fair play mysteries in the sense that you have the information Friday uses to solve the crimes, but Spratt is to be commended for at least making Friday explain how she’s reached the conclusions she has (“The scuff marks on your shoes show that you trip over an unusual amount.”). This is essentially a Sherlock Holmes tale, except that instead of merely throwing out the conclusions of their deductions with no context you get a fast, often funny explanation of how the genius detective got there.

This entire review could just have been quotes from the book because, oh my god, there is no shortage of quotable lines…

“I’ve done a statistical analysis of the amount of time you make people wait before they come in to see you,” said Friday. “Parents are left to wait three minutes, teachers six minutes, and students seventeen. No doubt this is a Sun Tzu’s Art of War–inspired intimidation tactic they teach you at headmaster training camp.”

…but I cannot recommend this too highly, certainly if you’re in the mood for something that’s intent simply to be delightful and clearly not even slightly serious. And it even joins up the narrative in a way I hadn’t anticipated and ends on a cliffhanger that for once makes me excited for the sequel it is unashamedly baiting you with. And the good news is that the fourteenth title in the series comes out this year, so there’s plenty to dive into in the meantime. Expect much, much more from Miss Barnes on The Invisible Event in future.

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A quick note on editions: I read the Puffin edition pictured at the top, from which all the quotes above are taken. But certain editions would seem, Enid Blyton-like, to have been edited. The Roaring Book Press edition, with illustrations by Phil Gosier, for one, would seem to have its text somewhat simplified and a lot of the best lines taken out — the one about the plastic surgery quoted above, for instance. Hopefully this is nothing more sinister than to help it appeal to a broader, younger audience, but be aware that for maximum joy you’ll need the unbowdlerised text