Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen – The Seaside Corpse

Marthe Jocelyn's The Seaside Corpse is an Aggie Morton mystery for 10 year olds about a summer fossil dig that turns up more than old bones.

What happens

It's July 1903 and Aggie is twelve. She wants to be a writer and she can't stop describing things (a steam train, in her head, is part dragon and part Minotaur). This week she gets her first ride in a motor car and her first night in a tent.

Her brother-in-law drives her to Lyme Regis in his shiny new Peugeot, collecting her best friend Hector from the station on the way. Hector is Belgian, very tidy and very clever. He travels in a sailor suit and brings his magnifying glass, and he isn't at all happy about outdoor toilets, crickets, adders or possible bears.

They've been invited to Camp Crewe, a circle of canvas tents above the beach, to help a husband and wife dig up a fish lizard. It's an ichthyosaur called Izzy, nearly nine feet long, lying out past the rock ledges, so close to the low-tide line that they can only reach it when the sea pulls right back.

The camp is full of people who all want something. Nina, who found Izzy, goes barefoot in trousers, swears and wants her own name on her discoveries. Her husband wants it on his. An American millionaire wants to buy the bones. A circus owner in a striped suit and a scarlet hatband turns up very interested in the sea monster. And Helen, the cook's daughter, has a secret sweetheart and goes pink when the circus man says her name.

Aggie tells it all herself, and she's a lovely narrator. She's shy, nosy and a bit dramatic. She visits Mary Anning's grave in the churchyard and is thrilled that Mary found the first ichthyosaur when she was twelve, too. Who wouldn't want to chip a real ammonite out of a rock?

And yes, Aggie and Hector find a body down on the shore, a human one rather than a fossil, so this is a mystery with a real death in it. There's a little mild swearing as well. Aggie's father died eighteen months before the story starts, and she still talks to him most days, which is sad but handled gently.

It isn't the first Aggie and Hector mystery, and they mention earlier adventures in passing, but you can pick it up here.

What to read next

If they'd rather start where Aggie and Hector first meet, over a floor full of broken strawberry drops in a Torquay sweet shop, go back to The Body under the Piano.