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Mondays with Authors: Alan Bradley reflects the charm of his Flavia de Luce mysteries series

Bradley's mystery series featuring 11-year-old Flavia de Luce has found popularity with readers of all ages

​Tricia vanderhoof
@triciavand
  • After 25 years at the University of Saskatchewan, Bradley took early retirement to become a full-time writer
  • He was told "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" (2009) was too long a title, and that books with green covers never sold
  • "Sweetness" won more awards than any other first novel and launched his internationally-best-selling Flavia de Luce series, now published in dozens of countries in dozens of languages
  • Youngest of three with two older sisters, Flavia's revenges on Daffy (Daphne) and Feely (Ophelia) echo Bradley's own childhood

Alan Bradley was born in Toronto in 1938. An electronics engineer who worked at radio and TV stations across Ontario, he eventually became director of Television and Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.

'I was on the prairies for a long time, 25 years," he said. "After Saskatoon, (he and wife Shirley) moved to British Columbia for 15 years, then to Malta for about four, now Isle of Man.'

Bradley took early retirement in 1994 to pursue writing. After several short stories and multiple screenplays, he began his first novel in the spring of 2006. Submitting only a draft chapter and synopsis for a CWA Debut Dagger competition, "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" went on to win nine out of 12 award nominations in Best First Novel /Mystery and Young Adult categories. (though all of the novels in the series have found a significant adult following, too).

His newest in the Flavia de Luce series,"Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd," was published in September by Delacorte Press, Penguin Random House, for $26.

Canadian author Alan Bradley has published many children's stories; his mystery novel series featuring 11-year-old detective Flavia de Luce has garnered fans of all ages. and arts columns in Canadian newspapers. His adult stories have been broadcast on CBC Radio and published in various literary journals.

Bradley is a man of anecdotes, charm, and warm wit. Trenchant humor, profound intellect, and prodigious talent abound in his books. We spoke for almost two hours from his home in Peel on Isle of Man in the Irish Sea.

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Flavia de Luce series (2009 to present)

The series begins in postwar England in 1950 at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw in Bishop's Lacey. Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce has violet eyes. She is fierce, fearless, and defined by her loyalties and passions — for chemistry, for horehound candy, for her father and his history and her late mother for hers, and for her staunchly dependable bicycle, Gladys.

Her widowed father, a colonel during World War II, often calls for his daughters in order of their birth: Ophelia, Daphne, Flavia-damn-it.

When she finds a dying man in their cucumber patch ('How very like you,' Ophelia said), Flavia exploits the dismissiveness of her emotionally distracted family and almost all other adults who underestimate her — as they do most children — which leaves Flavia free to pursue her own suspicions.

Brilliant, an aspiring chemist with a fascination for toxicology (poisons), possessed of youthful idealism, enthusiasm, and burning curiosity for all things, Flavia finds herself appalled and delighted by death, which "is by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life."

When asked why he chose age 11 to begin the series, Bradley replied, "An 11-year-old is on the cusp: neither girl nor woman; man nor boy. It is a magical age when, given the gift of wonder, anything — anything! — is possible. It is also the most vulnerable, a world that is very quickly lost.'

"Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd" is the eighth book in the series. After being sent to — and ejected from — Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Canada, Flavia (now 12) returns home to find her father gravely ill. On an errand to deliver a message from the vicar's wife, Flavia finds the intended recipient hanging upside-down on the back of his bedroom door. A cat is the only other witness.

Flavia is energized: "'It's amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one's spirits."

The titles are part of the charm in Alan Bradley's mystery novel series featuring 11-year-old detective Flavia de Luce.

Prelude, and research

MwA: You were born, raised, and built your career in Toronto. How now the Isle of Man?

AB:  It was very interesting. I'd never done much travelling, but when Flavia started taking off, becoming very, very popular in Europe, I was being offered a lot of opportunities. So we said 'why not?' and began to visit countries where the books were published. We did that for about five years. Islands mostly.

On holiday to the Isle of Man, we walked off the airplane and immediately knew that this was where we wanted to be. It's almost five years now.

MwA:  Isle of Man is very tiny (just 32 miles long and 14 miles at its widest point, population less than 90,000). Other than origin of the tailless Manx cat, many people might never have heard of it.

AB: It's in the Irish Sea, between England and Northern Ireland. Scotland (to the north) is closest and we can actually take a walk and see three or four distinct spits when there's no mist. The landscape here makes you very much a part of it, as if you're being woven into it, and it woven into you.

MwA:  You write so convincingly about the de Luce landscape — Buckshaw, their moldering ancestral home ('wallpaper bubbling off the walls') and the village of Bishop's Lacey — that the locations are characters in themselves. Yet you'd never been to England when you began the series?

AB: I had never left North America until I won the UK Dagger Award in 2007. But it is where Flavia feels most at home.

At roughly the same age as Flavia, I had read a lot about it. I grew up in Cobourg in southern Ontario in a household of British expats surrounded by nostalgia for their homeland.  ur grandmother's house was always overflowing with issues of The Strand and other English magazines.

For the series, I read thousands more from the '50s and absorbed it all. There also was a time when I went to the library three or four times a week and picked up anything, as long as it was English: costumes, glass manufacturing, geology, memoirs, the history of English magicians.  Flavia is the payoff for a half century of indulging myself. Thus 1950s England.

MwA: You were a radio and television engineer. Why chemistry?  he amount of research must be prodigious.

AB: (laughs) Flavia arrived with a passion for chemistry. I don't claim credit for that. It surprised me. I was quite taken aback because of my vast ignorance in that field. But I gradually realized her enthusiasm for chemistry was as great as mine for electronics.

There is no doubt that 90 percent of a Flavia book is research. It takes huge amounts of time to sift through material and come up with appropriate chemistry scenarios.

The Flavia de Luce mystery series by Alan Bradley has been a hit with readers of all ages.

MwA:  How did you begin?

AB: I found a chemistry text from 1911 in a secondhand bookstore.  he terminology was enormously different and sifting through it for appropriate scenarios was difficult. In an unused wing at Buckshaw, Flavia discovers the lab and library of her late Uncle Tarquin who died in 1928, so her chemistry would be old-fashioned even in the '50s.

MwA: If that's so, how do you concoct the ingenious resolutions?

AB: The wonderful solutions come from Flavia, not me. That is the magic. And when I investigate, it turns out to be absolutely possible.

Flavia and her passions

MwA: Your wife was the one who urged 'the girl on the camp stool' as subject for Crime Writers of America's writing competition?

AB: Cecilia Walters of CBC Radio was interviewing Louise Penny who was short-listed that year. My wife noted all the details down on a piece of paper and said, 'you have to send in a story.' I had been working on a different book in which Flavia had appeared simply as a girl sitting on a camp stool, writing down license plate numbers as cars went by.  It was Shirley who said, 'send Flavia.'

For a long time, I tried to push Flavia aside but she had separated herself from the background of my own imagination to become something more. I didn't invite her. She hi-jacked me, and eventually prevailed, and I won the Dagger.

MwA: About Flavia's influence, you've said that your wife speaks of her as being one of your children. Does Flavia lead you as merry a chase as she does the de Luces?

AB: She rules my life, and Shirley's; she co-opted both. The household goes by what Flavia is doing. When she's in full cry, everything else stops.

MwA:  You say Flavia informs you of her opinions and personality.

AB: I've learned to restrain my ego, not overrule her. The process is far more of listening than writing.

There are spooky things that happen when I am writing.  Flavia will sometimes, in the middle of a page, suggest doing something that doesn't sound possible. But I've found that questioning her as a writer contorted her thought process as a character.

MwA:  Is the same true for each character?

AB:  I listen internally to what each one is saying. Feely and Daffy – they came as they were. Their attributes and manner of speaking were a gift-wrapped package. The delivery quite often comes out the character.

MwA: Flavia has a very special place in her heart for the family's enigmatic factotum Dogger, who was in the war with her father.

AB: I feel that particularly, writing every scene with them, a hush comes over everything, breathless, a suspension. I must be inconspicuous and I'm listening very acutely. You must not inject any of yourself in it at all.

MwA:  At one point, Flavia utters two nonsense words, 'Selab Dusticafeenio,' which she likens to a spell and sometimes uses to disconcert 'those who take liberties.' In Acknowledgments, you thank cousins Garth and Helga Taylor for ' . . . a forgotten piece of family incantatory lore.'  Are the two connected? 

AB: Yes, during an unforgettable trip to Ottawa. They're cousins I hadn't seen in almost 50 years. Garth and I have a lot in common; we both spent almost all our time – more than we were ever home – at our beloved grandmother's house which was always tumbling with books and gooseberry tarts.

Garth's father was going through our grandfather's papers and came across this magic word. It was very long (24 letters) which I cut down for the book. My grandfather had run away to sea when he was 7 and didn't come home until he was 18. It was a nonsense curse and my grandfather had been known to say it, but even his sons never found out the meaning.

Precocious children, sisters and fiendish minds

MwA:  You wrote: 'There is a certain type of person to whom a closed door is a challenge. For Flavia, a closed door is more than a mystery to be solved. It is a slap in the face. . . . like a red rag to a bull, it cannot go unchallenged.'

Flavia is youngest with two older sisters. So were you. Do you have a specific memory of closed doors that enraged you as a boy?

In "As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust," Alan Bradley's 11-year-old detective heroine Flavia de Luce finds herself involved in a mystery at a Canadian boarding school.

AB: Quite a few of them. "The Shoebox Bible" (2006) is a memoir of my mother's life and provides a lot of detail.) They kept their chewing gum and movie magazines in their room and I became an adept pupil. I was pretty good — I had to be.

MwA: They taught you to read before kindergarten so they would not have to bother with you?

AB: They were 8 and 10 years older than I and already had boyfriends. Though our mother didn't play, we always had a piano and boys would come over to visit and play it.

When I was about 3 or even 4, (my sisters) used to throw me in my crib and tie my hands behind my back with nylon stockings  I'm still very proud of the fact that I can still untie my hands behind my back. They were both very precocious and bright and devised the most subtle tortures.  ou must learn how to get along with it.

MwA:  Reading was a big part of that?

AB: One year, starting school, I contracted every disease in the book —chicken pox, measles, scarlet fever, you name it. I was in bed for a year. In kindergarten, I was actually reading novels. I remember getting my hands on a bootleg copy of James Joyce's 'Ulysses.' Even although I didn't understand the meanings, the flow of words was mesmerizing.

MwA:  You have said that authors are known to have fiendishly clever minds, and authors of children's books are more fiendishly clever than most.

AB:  I think they are. Children's books are much more subtle in motivation and in raw story-telling power. They're not thrillers, not shallow or superficial with no underlying support, not a lot of copycat stuff. They have to be fiendishly clever and original. I love and read children's books.

MwA:  Were you surprised that adults love your books are much as children?

AB: The Flavia books were intended originally for adults  It always amazes me that readers range from 8 to 95. Last year in Ottawa, a couple brought their daughter who insisted all the Flavia books be read aloud to her and forced her parents to act out Mrs. Mullett (the cook) and Dogger. She was 4 and one of the most articulate people I've ever met in my life!

MwA: You love language. How do you exhibit this in the Flavia books?

AB: One of the things I've always talked about was the wonder of learning  It isn't what you're learning, simply the act of learning is pleasurable — like sex. It should generate huge pleasure in the mind.

That seems to have gone out of fashion now but I remember when I was 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, there were Children's Encyclopedias, thousands and thousands of pages put together with wonderful things!

I try to hold Flavia up as to how to entertain by learning. I hark back to my own early learning, harnessing that burning enthusiasm. I'm always talking about idealism. The only comfort I find now is going back to my childhood and reading Plato. It is my prescription for anyone who's feeling down: Go read Plato. Or Emerson.

MwA: Flavia has become a role model for girls who might consider the sciences as a career.

AB:  I've been doing some work with women in Wisconsin, the Einstein Project, placing the Flavia books, promoting girls and young people in general to go into the sciences. We're finding the girls who read them tend to pursue sciences, technology, engineering and math (STEM).

Tiles, bucking tradition and the future

MwA:  Your titles are based on classical quotations. How did this come about?

AB: My wife and I were out strolling and came across a tag sale with a six-volume dictionary from 1890. It also provided historical provenance for the entries. She bought it for me, and leafing through it, I came across the word 'crinkle.' I thought it was a word rarely heard any more but this marvelous book had historical etymology: 'Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie, who cares for all the crinkling of the pie.' It was written in the 1700s by William King from his satiric poem, "The Art of Cookery."

I wrote it on a piece of paper and put it away. Half-way through the first book (Sweetness) it hit me on the head, 'That has to be the title!'

MwA:  Did your publisher agree?

AB:  I was told it was too long, books with long titles don't do well — and never publish a book with a green cover, it will never sell! It was an uphill battle for the first couple of books (the next was "The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag") but by the fourth, fifth and sixth, they were starting to become what they are now.

Flavia prevails once more. I know all the titles now, all the way up to the 10th book.

MwA:  The original order was for six books, now extended to 10?

AB: I'm working on the ninth right now; it will probably be out next September. Flavia was 11, she's still only about 12 now, the books have covered just a little stretch of time. Someone suggested 'Flavia at 70, Looking Back' (laughing) but first we have to get to 10. Then we'll see.

MwA: Any plans to come stateside?

AB: No, travel is so difficult and so stressful nowadays. But I am doing more Skype and schools. I was in New York City last January as a Distinguished Speaker at the 18th Annual Baker Street Irregulars bash, after which we took a month-long tour in Canada.

MwA: British director and Academy Award Winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, Skyfall, Spectre) optioned the Flavia books for a proposed TV series. Status?

AB:  Gone on hold. Those things take so long, 10 to 15 years. They were in the scripting stage and producers were assigned but the options kept running out, being renewed, running out again.

AB:  Talking about precocious schoolchildren, one more anecdote. There's always been a powerful literary tide on the Isle of Man and I was asked to become our annual Manx Litfest's first ever patron  I launched 'Thrice theBrinded Cat Hath Mew'd' here in October and, in conjunction, was visiting schools and teaching about writing, bringing grubby-looking manuscripts and explaining how, gradually, they became a beautiful work of art.

In a small school not far from where we live, I asked if anyone knew the origin of the title.  The villages are small so the class was mixed in age, perhaps 9 to 11  A girl in front of the class said, 'That's from Macbeth.' I asked how she knew this and she said, 'Oh, we studied Shakespeare last year. We also read Twelfth Night, and I frankly preferred that.

She couldn't have been more than 11. It's precisely that raw energy and exuberance and wide-eyed enthusiasm that is always so refreshing.

Follow Alan Bradley on the web at alanbradleyauthor.com, and on Facebook