‘The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches’ by Alan Bradley

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

It would have been about four years ago when I had the quite pleasant occasion to interview Alan Bradley regarding his first Flavia de Luce mystery novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Bradley is an engaging and interesting conversationalist and at the time he was feeling well chuffed and equally amazed at the tremendous praise his novel about a precocious little girl detective was receiving. As you might know, and if not I’ll tell you, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie won no less than seven major awards in both Mystery and First Novel categories. At the time we talked, those awards were still in the near future, yet the book was roaring up the bestseller lists and it didn’t take much of a crystal ball to prophesy that its author was now made in the shade.

Because I was not dealing with the fragile egg of a sweating debut novelist, I felt free to mention the one problem I had with Flavia. Ten-year-old girls simply do not talk or write like head mistresses of proper British boarding schools regardless of their precocity. I suggested to Bradley that the only way I could get past that problem was by noting that as the novel was written in the past tense, it was therefore a formally educated and mature Flavia who was doing the first person narration, looking back with the sophistication of her years at the period in her life around 1950.  Regrettably I cannot find the recording of the interview, but by my recollection Bradley said that he hadn’t thought of looking at the book that way, but if that worked for me, well why not?

I offer up the above anecdote as an antidote in case you have the same problem I had, and in truth still do. The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is the sixth novel in the series, with a cracking two million copies in print of the first five. Flavia is about to have her own television series and given that she has only just turned eleven at the time of this current novel, she can easily keep starring in mysteries until she’s old enough to call Miss Marple that young lady who lives down the road.

Flavis is very much the main character of all the novels, yet she comes from a fascinating family. Her two elder sisters, Feely and Daffy, are as remarkably talented and intelligent as she is and all three bristle with ego. God knows how their widowed, somewhat aloof father survives. An example:

Or had I misread the word? Because the letters had blurred so quickly as they were heated, it might originally have read “Linz,” which was a city in Austria. I was quite sure of that because Feely had mentioned that Mozart wrote one of his best symphonies there at white heat – in just four days – for some old count or another. Was there a palace at Linz? It seemed more likely than Lens, but I would have to ask Daffy, who was more or less our household Inquire Within Upon Everything.

Yes it is ever so handy to have an eldest sister who is a pianist and musical scholar, and a middle sister who reads absolutely everything about everything. When a cousin Flavia’s age named Undine shows up at the family estate of Buckshaw and Undine in turn is just as brilliant as the rest, one has the urge to shriek, ‘Does no one ever play with a bloody doll any more?’ That urge is resisted because the Flavia de Luce novels are so damnably entertaining.

Oh dear God they’re entertaining. They remind in a way of Robert Altman’s great film salute to the English manor house murder mystery, Gosford Park. The milieu of swanning toffs, diligent plodding coppers and inevitably overly-emotional house staff (show me a housekeeper who doesn’t sob uncontrollably and I’ll show you a bloodless heart) are much the same, as is the sly wink at the proceedings given by both Altman and Bradley. All the characters are as eccentric and the puzzle as much fun as Colonel Mustard in a game of Clue.

As regards the plot, it is to be honest with you on the slight side. The three sisters’ long-lost mother Harriet – they all refer to her by her first name – has been found at last. Unfortunately she has been found dead: encased in ice in the Himalayas. And so she returns, not to champagne and happy hugs, but in a coffin for her own funeral. Oh damn. Just after the body is unloaded at the train station and after Winston Churchill makes a cameo appearance muttering something about pheasant sandwiches, a stranger is run over by the train. Strangers on a Train? No no, this one’s a Stranger Under a Train. So off we go. Who did what to whom?

Borrowing from the playbooks of Sherlock Holmes and McGyver, the chemistry talents of our Flavia get to work in solving the riddles of dead men under trains, pheasant sandwiches, and in a side-note also trying to revive Harriet’s corpse. It is a touching note that when Flavia pries open the coffin, it is the only time she ever actually sees her mother’s face, well-preserved as it is.

But back to the chemistry. One of the joys of intelligent mysteries is that one does learn a few things along the way. I certainly had no idea – and I’m assuming Alan Bradley is correct in his research – that in a pinch coffee can serve as a developing liquid for silver nitrate movie film. Equally good to know is that urine is a suitable invisible ink. This made for a rather odd coincidence. I had just recently read about the formation of Britain’s MI6 whose first director Mansfield Cumming told his first agents that semen was also an invisible ink. I’m not sure if Cumming knew about urine and was just having a private joke. Or perhaps he was living up to his name.

All in all, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is a well-written lark and certainly stands a cut well above the vast majority of whodunits bought and then forgotten as long flight reading material. Without giving anything away, the series is about to take quite a turn in venue as Flavia matures. Or wait, strike that. I mean as Flavia ages for she was definitely born mature.

Doubleday | 320 pages |  $29.95 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0385668156