Juvenile Mysteries
#425: Minor Felonies – Space Case (2014) by Stuart Gibbs
At 12 years old, Dash Gibson is so famous that in a hundred years people will still be learning about him in school — no mere flash in the pan fame for him and his family, their names will go down in human history. Because they are among the first human beings ever to live on the moon.
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#422: Minor Felonies – The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage (1943) by Enid Blyton
As is my standard modus operandi, I started Enid Blyton’s Five Find-Outers series midway through with something featuring an impossible crime, and now return to the beginning to read them in order.
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#407: The Wants – Five Authors I’d Love to See Completely Reprinted
You’ll of course be aware that the birth stone for July is the ruby which — apologies for going over something we all know — signifies contentment. And so for Tuesdays in July I shall be putting forth a series of lists that, as a GAD fan, would go some way to enhancing my own content with the world.
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#406: A Change for the…Different in The Mystery of the Green Ghost (1965) by Robert Arthur
Full disclosure: the above image does not depict the copy of this I possess. One day I hope to acquire this edition, so that I may have a matching set of these Armada paperbacks, but equally some fools want silly money for this secondhand and, well, I’ve held forth on that already.
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#393: Minor Felonies – Murder Most Unladylike, a.k.a. Murder is Bad Manners (2014) by Robin Stevens
It’s nearly 12 months since, at the Bodies from the Library conference in 2017, Dan casually mentioned that one of the Murder Most Unladylike books by Robin Stevens was a locked room mystery and so started me on a mildly-obsessive YA spiral that has taken in the detective talents of Enid Blyton, the beginning phases of Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, a selection of classic and modern juvenile mysteries, and, of course, an interview with Robin Stevens herself at the beginning of our podcast adventure.
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#390: Minor Felonies – Feel the Fear (2014) by Lauren Child
I apologise if I appear to be giving some import to my own fevered speculations here, but a few weeks ago I wrote that “I absolutely commend the role literature plays in helping people, young or otherwise, make sense of the world around them, but it’s also nice that sometimes a novel about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder can just be about a couple of 11 year-olds solving a murder”. I referenced it once already, and now I’m doing it again. Yeesh, my ego.
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#387: Minor Felonies – Alice Jones: The Ghost Light (2017) by Sarah Rubin
I am aware that some (many/most/all?) of my readers do not share my fascination with the current Young Adult detective fiction scene, and to a certain extent I sympathise. But in an age where detection is eschewed in grown-up circles — with unreliable narrators prevailing, and amnesia conveniently repealed at the 85% mark to hurry in a conclusion because clewing has failed — it heartens me to know that younger generations are being raised with access to the rigorous principles that delight so many of us.
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#384: Minor Felonies – Smart (2014) by Kim Slater
The Invisible Event 