Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen – The Dead Man in the Garden

Marthe Jocelyn's Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen - The Dead Man in the Garden is a mystery for 10 year olds about a girl with what her mother calls a Morbid Preoccupation.

What happens

Aggie is shy, watchful, and writes everything down. She is also, quite openly, a young Agatha Christie, and her best friend is a small, very formal Belgian boy called Hector Perot who says "Mais oui, madame" and bows from the waist.

They have come to a spa hotel in Harrogate so that Aggie's mother can sit in the steam and drink the healing waters. Her father died more than a year ago and she is still wearing black gloves in company.

An hour after they arrive, a boy in a wheelchair comes round a corner at speed, nearly flattens an elderly gentleman with a walking stick, and mentions in passing that a guest called Mrs Shelton died three days ago. She had been ill. She moved out of the hotel, got better, and was then found dead on a bench in the park across the road.

Out comes Aggie's notebook.

What makes this sing is the voice. Aggie tells you plainly that a story should lull you with pleasant scenery first and produce the corpse later. She turns a man who flirts with her mother into a toad, inside her own head, warts and webbed fingers and all. She is honest about the odd shape of her grief too, that when a stranger dies she finds herself wondering how rather than who will miss them, and she cannot explain why.

George, the boy in the wheelchair, is the other reason to read it. He does sprints down hotel corridors on purpose, because he would far rather be told off than looked past.

Something to prepare for. This is the early 1900s and the attitudes of the period are right there on the page. A gentleman calls George a cripple and demands to know why he is allowed to tear about like a hooligan, and George throws the word back at him, sarcastically, in a letter of apology he composes out loud. The book is squarely on George's side, but the language is not softened. There is also a sly grown-up remark about a widow who was "never properly married" that sails over Aggie's head, and by the end of the setup there are two deaths to explain.

What to read next

If your reader would rather begin at the beginning, The Body under the Piano is here. Aggie has only just turned twelve, a real friend her own age is a rare event, and she meets Hector on the day she finds a body on the floor of the Mermaid Dance Room above a sweet shop.