Alan bradleys flavia de.., p.31
Alan Bradley's Flavia de Luce 3-Book Bundle, page 31
To Kate Miciak and Molly Boyle, of Bantam Dell in New York, and Kristin Cochrane of Doubleday Canada, for their early faith and encouragement.
Special thanks to Janet Cooke, vice president, director of sales, the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, whose enthusiasm has contributed so much to the world of Flavia de Luce.
To Robyn Karney and Connie Munro, copy editors at Orion Books and at Bantam Dell, respectively, for their excellent and perceptive suggestions. And to Emma Wallace and Genevieve Pegg, also at Orion Books, for their enthusiastic and friendly welcome.
To the helpful and friendly staff of the British Postal Museum and Archive, at Freeling House, Phoenix Place, London, for so cheerfully answering my questions and allowing me access to materials in their care relating to the history of the Penny Black.
To my longtime Saskatoon friends and connoisseurs of crime, Mary Gilliland and Allan and Janice Cushon for putting into my hands the Edwardian equivalent of the Internet: a complete set of the eleventh edition (1911) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which must surely be every detective novelist’s dream.
To David Whiteside, of the Bukowski Agency, for his yeoman work in bringing order to the necessary mountains of paperwork and red tape.
To my dear friends Dr. John and Janet Harland, who were there at every step along the way with many useful and often brilliant suggestions. Without their enthusiasm, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie would have been a lesser book and much less fun to write.
All of these kind people have given me their best advice; if any mistakes have crept in, they are mine alone.
And finally, with love and eternal thanks to my wife, Shirley, who urged me—no, insisted that I allow Flavia and the de Luce family to emerge from the bundle of notes in which they had been languishing for far too long.
The Sweetness
at the Bottom
of the Pie
ALAN BRADLEY
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with
Alan Bradley
Random House: With the publication of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, you’ve become a seventy-year-old first-time novelist. Have you always had a passion for writing—or is it more of a recent development?
Alan Bradley: Well, the Roman author Seneca once said something like this: “Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms—you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.” So to put it briefly, I’m taking his advice.
I actually spent most of my life working on the technical side of television production, but would like to think that I’ve always been a writer. I started writing a novel at age five and have written articles for various publications all my life. It wasn’t until my early retirement, though, that I started writing books. I published my memoir, The Shoebox Bible, in 2004, and then started working on a mystery about a reporter in England. It was during the writing of this story that I stumbled across Flavia de Luce, the main character in Sweetness.
RH: Flavia certainly is an interesting character. How did you come up with such a forceful, precocious, and entertaining personality?
AB: Flavia walked onto the pages of another book I was writing, and simply hijacked the story. I was actually well into this other book—about three or four chapters—and as I introduced a main character, a detective, there was a point where he was required to go to a country house and interview this colonel.
I got the detective up to the driveway and there was this girl sitting on a camp stool doing something with a notebook and a pencil. He stopped and asked her what she was doing and she said, “Writing down license plate numbers,” and he said, “Well, there can’t be many in such a place,” and she said, “Well, I have yours, don’t I?” I came to a stop. I had no idea who this girl was and where she came from.
She just materialized. I can’t take any credit for Flavia at all. I’ve never had a character who came that much to life. I’ve had characters that tend to tell you what to do, but Flavia grabbed the controls on page one. She sprang full-blown with all of her attributes—her passion for poison, her father and his history—all in one package. It surprised me.
RH: There aren’t many adult books that feature child narrators. Why did you want Flavia to be the voice of this novel?
AB: People probably wonder, “What’s a seventy-year-old-man doing writing about an eleven-year-old-girl in 1950s England?” And it’s a fair question. To me, Flavia em bodies that kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything—absolutely anything!—is within our capabilities.
I think the reason she manifested herself as a young girl is that I realized that it would really be a lot of fun to have somebody who was virtually invisible in a village. And, of course, we don’t listen to what children say—they’re always asking questions, and nobody pays the slightest attention or thinks for a minute that children are going to do anything with the information that adults let slip. I wanted Flavia to take great advantage of that. I was also intrigued by the possibilities of dealing with an unreliable narrator, one whose motives were not always on the up-and-up.
She is an amalgam of burning enthusiasm, curiosity, energy, youthful idealism, and frightening fearlessness. She’s also a very real menace to anyone who thwarts her, but fortunately, they don’t generally realize it.
RH: Like Flavia, you were eleven years old in 1950. Is there anything autobiographical about her character?
AB: Somebody pointed out the fact that both Flavia and I lacked a parent. But I wasn’t aware of this connection during the writing of the book. It simply didn’t cross my mind. It is true that I grew up in a home with only one parent, and I was allowed to run pretty well free, to do the kinds of things I wanted. And I did have extremely intense interests then—things that you get focused on. When you’re that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me—that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.
RH: Your story evokes such a vivid setting. Had you spent much time in the British countryside before writing this book?
AB: My first trip to England didn’t come until I went to London to receive the 2007 Debut Dagger Award, so I had never even stepped foot in the country at the time of writing Sweetness. But I have always loved England. My mother was born there. And I’ve always felt I grew up in a very English household. I had always wanted to go and had dreamed for many years of doing so.
When I finally made it there, the England that I was seeing with my eyes was quite unlike the England I had imagined, and yet it was the same. I realized that the differences were precisely those differences between real life and the simulation of real life that we create in our detective novels. So this was an opportunity to create on the page this England that had been in my head my whole life.
RH: You have five more books lined up in this series, all coming from Delacorte Press. Will Flavia age as the series goes on?
AB: A bit, not very much. I think she’s going to remain in the same age bracket. I don’t really like the idea of Flavia as an older teenager. At her current age, she is such a concoction of contradictions. It’s one of the things that I very much love about her. She’s eleven but she has the wisdom of an adult. She knows everything about chemistry but nothing about family relationships.
I don’t think she’d be the same person if she were a few years older. She certainly wouldn’t have access to the drawing rooms of the village.
RH: Do you have a sense of what the next books in the series will be about?
AB: The second book, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, is finished, and I’m working on the third book. I have a general idea of what’s happening in each of them, because I wanted to focus on some bygone aspect of British life that was still there in the fifties but has now vanished. So we have postage stamps in the first one… The second book is about the traveling puppet shows on the village green. And one of them is about filmmaking—it sort of harks back to the days of the classic Ealing comedies with Alec Guinness and so forth.
RH: Not every author garners such immediate success with a first novel. After completing only fifteen pages of Sweetness, you won the Dagger award and within eight days had secured book deals in three countries. You’ve since secured twenty-eight countries. Enthusiasm continues to grow from every angle. How does it feel?
AB: It’s like being in the glow of a fire. You hope you won’t get burned. I’m not sure how much I’ve realized it yet. I guess I can say I’m “almost overwhelmed”—I’m not quite overwhelmed, but I’m getting there. Every day has something new happening, and communications pouring in from people all over. The book has been receiving wonderful reviews and touching people. But Flavia has been touching something in people that generates a response from the heart, and the most often mentioned word in the reviews is love—how much people love Flavia and have taken her in as if she’s a long-lost member of their family, which is certainly very, very gratifying.
Questions and Topics
for Discussion
1. With her high level of knowledge, her erudition, and her self-reliance, Flavia hardly seems your typical eleven-year-old girl. Or does she? Discuss Flavia and her personality, and how her character drives this novel. Can you think of other books that have used a similar protagonist?
2. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie falls within the tradition of English country-house mysteries, but with the devilishly intelligent Flavia racing around Bishop’s Lacey on her bike, instead of the expected older woman ferreting out the truth by chatting with her fellow villagers. Discuss how Bradley uses the traditions of the genre, and how he plays with them.
3. What is your favorite scene from The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie?
4. With her excessive interest in poisons and revenge, it’s no surprise that Flavia is fascinated, not scared, as she watches the stranger die in her garden. In your view, is her dark matter-of-factness more refreshing or disturbing?
5. Flavia reminds us often about Harriet, the mother she never knew, and has many keepsakes that help her imagine what Harriet was like. Do you think the real Harriet would have fit into Flavia’s mold?
6. Flavia’s distance from her father, the Colonel, is obvious, yet she loves him all the same. Does their relationship change over the course of the novel in a lasting way? Would Flavia want it to?
7. Through Flavia’s eyes, what sort of picture does Alan Bradley paint of the British aristocracy? Think as well about how appearances aren’t always reality, as with the borderline bankruptcies of Flavia’s father and Dr. Kissing.
8. Discuss the meaning (or meanings) of the title The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
9. What twists in the plot surprised you the most?
10. Buckshaw, the estate, is almost a character in its own right here, with its overlarge wings, hidden laboratory, and pinched front gates. Talk about how Bradley brings the setting to life in this novel—not only Buckshaw itself, but Bishop’s Lacey and the surrounding area.
11. What does Flavia care about most in life? How do the people around her compare to her chemistry lab and books?
12. Like any scientist, Flavia expects her world to obey certain rules, and seems to be thrown off kilter when surprises occur. How much does she rely on the predictability of those around her, like her father and her sisters, in order to pursue her own interests (like solving the murder)?
Again, for Shirley
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Acknowledgments
A Postcard from Everywhere
Questions and Topics for Discussion
Copyright
SIR WALTER RALEIGH TO HIS SON
Three things there be that prosper up apace,
And flourish while they grow asunder far;
But on a day, they meet all in a place,
And when they meet, they one another mar.
And they be these; the Wood, the Weed, the Wag:
The Wood is that that makes the gallows tree;
The Weed is that that strings the hangman’s bag;
The Wag, my pretty knave, betokens thee.
Now mark, dear boy—while these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild;
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot,
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
• ONE •
I WAS LYING DEAD in the churchyard. An hour had crept by since the mourners had said their last sad farewells.
At twelve o’clock, just at the time we should otherwise have been sitting down to lunch, there had been the departure from Buckshaw: my polished rosewood coffin being brought out of the drawing room, carried slowly down the broad stone steps to the driveway, and slid with heartbreaking ease into the open door of the waiting hearse, crushing beneath it a little bouquet of wildflowers that had been laid gently inside by one of the grieving villagers.
Then there had been the long drive down the avenue of chestnuts to the Mulford Gates, whose rampant griffins looked away as we passed, though whether in sadness or in apathy I would never know.
Dogger, Father’s devoted jack-of-all-trades, had paced in measured step alongside the slow hearse, his head bowed, his hand resting lightly on its roof, as if to shield my remains from something that only he could see. At the gates, one of the undertaker’s mutes had finally coaxed him, by using hand signals, into a hired motorcar.
And so they had brought me to the village of Bishop’s Lacey, passing somberly through the same green lanes and dusty hedgerows I had bicycled every day when I was alive.
At the heaped-up churchyard of St. Tancred’s, they had taken me gently from the hearse and borne me at a snail’s pace up the path beneath the limes. Here, they had put me down for a moment in the new-mown grass.
Then had come the service at the gaping grave, and there had been a note of genuine grief in the voice of the vicar as he pronounced the traditional words.
It was the first time I’d heard the Order for the Burial of the Dead from this vantage point. We had attended last year, with Father, the funeral of old Mr. Dean, the village greengrocer. His grave, in fact, was just a few yards from where I was presently lying. It had already caved in, leaving not much more than a rectangular depression in the grass that was, more often than not, filled with stagnant rainwater.
My oldest sister, Ophelia, said it collapsed because Mr. Dean had been resurrected and was no longer bodily present, while Daphne, my other sister, said it was because he had plummeted through into an older grave whose occupant had disintegrated.
I thought of the soup of bones below: the soup of which I was about to become just another ingredient.
Flavia Sabina de Luce, 1939–1950, they would cause to be carved on my gravestone, a modest and tasteful gray marble thing with no room for false sentiments.
Pity. If I’d lived long enough, I’d have left written instructions calling for a touch of Wordsworth:
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
And if they’d balked at that, I’d have left this as my second choice:
Truest hearts by deeds unkind
To despair are most inclined.
Only Feely, who had played and sung them at the piano, would recognize the lines from Thomas Campion’s Third Book of Airs, and she would be too consumed by guilty grief to tell anyone.
My thoughts were interrupted by the vicar’s voice.
“… earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body …”
And suddenly they had gone, leaving me there alone—alone to listen for the worms.
This was it: the end of the road for poor Flavia.
By now the family would already be back at Buckshaw, gathered round the long refectory table: Father seated in his usual stony silence, Daffy and Feely hugging one another with slack, tearstained faces as Mrs. Mullet, our cook, brought in a platter of baked meats.
I remembered something that Daffy had once told me when she was devouring The Odyssey: that baked meats, in ancient Greece, were traditional funeral fare, and I had replied that, in view of Mrs. Mullet’s cooking, not much had changed in two and a half thousand years.
But now that I was dead, I thought, perhaps I ought to practice being somewhat more charitable.
Dogger, of course, would be inconsolable. Dear Dogger: butler-cum-chauffeur-cum-valet-cum-gardener-cum-estate-manager: a poor shell-shocked soul whose capabilities ebbed and flowed like the Severn tides; Dogger, who had recently saved my life and forgotten it by the next morning. I should miss him terribly.
