Читать книгу Mystery & Mayhem - Julia Golding - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

The very word ‘mystery’ is exciting. It instantly conjures up visions of ruined castles, secret passageways, lost treasures, brave detectives and dastardly villains. Most of all though, it suggests an enigma – a puzzle to solve, a question that characters as well as readers are trying to answer.

From Hercule Poirot to the Hardy Boys, the Secret Seven to Sherlock Holmes, mystery stories have long been favourites on our bookshelves. Whether it’s the Famous Five or Nancy Drew, it’s hard to resist the fun of an old-fashioned mystery tale. But over the last few years we’ve seen an explosion of brand new mysteries appearing in our bookshops and libraries. With page-turning plots, puzzling clues to follow and plenty of heart-pounding action and adventure, these books nod to the much-loved mysteries of the past, but also bring detective fiction bang up to date.

If you want to get a taste of this new generation of crime fiction, the twelve original stories in this collection are the perfect place to start. Showing just how varied and diverse today’s mysteries can be, this anthology takes us from an elegant Georgian country house in Helen Moss’s The Mystery of the Pineapple Plot to the buzzy streets of present-day Marsh Road in Elen Caldecott’s Rain on My Parade. We visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Frances Hardinge’s intriguing God’s Eye and explore the streets of 1780s Soho in Harriet Whitehorn’s The Murder of Monsieur Pierre.

These are stories that have plenty of fun with the traditions of crime fiction. Robin Stevens and Clementine Beauvais offer us brain-boggling, Agatha-Christie-style puzzles that even Miss Marple might struggle to solve; while Sally Nicholls’ Safe-Keeping is a tribute to ‘Boy’s Own’ style adventures. Caroline Lawrence’s modern-day mystery has a hint of the American Wild West and Julia Golding’s Mel Foster and the Hound of the Baskervilles even features an appearance from the great detective Sherlock Holmes himself.

The young sleuths in these stories can be anyone, from Kate Pankhurst’s quick-thinking dog-walker Sid to my own Edwardian chorus-girl-turned-detective Lil. But what unites them all is that they are the ones smart enough to unravel the mystery, rather than the adults around them. Sharp-eyed and even sharper-witted, these young heroes are courageous, cool-headed and clever, able to follow the clues and come up with the solution even when no one else can. Susie Day’s Emily and the Detectives illustrates this perfectly: the world believes that clueless Lord Copperbole and scientist Mr Black are brilliant detectives, but in fact it’s Mr Black’s daughter, the capable Emily, who’s really responsible for discovering whodunnit every time.

Perhaps one of the reasons that mystery stories like these are so enjoyable is that they allow us to share the challenge of solving the puzzle. We too can experience the satisfaction of pitting our wits against the mystery, piecing together the clues and unravelling the evidence to work out what happened and why. The stories in this collection offer exactly this challenge: can you solve the crimes alongside the daring young detectives? But whether or not you manage to crack the cases, there’s a huge amount of fun to be had along the way.

Happy sleuthing!

Katherine Woodfine