Corby Flood

Corby Flood by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell is a shipboard mystery for 7 year olds about a girl who hears something crying in a locked hold.

What happens

The S.S. Euphonia used to be the Empress of the Seas. There's a faded poster on board still advertising the voyage of a lifetime and ten ports of call.

These days she goes from Dandoon to Harbour Heights and back, non-stop, hauling cargo. The bilge pump keeps breaking. The first and second engineers have left for better jobs, so the third engineer cooks the dinners as well. Captain Belvedere has a drooping moustache and the general air of a disappointed walrus, and he'd like you to know the ship is only fit for the scrapheap, just like him.

Corby is eight, somewhere in the middle of six children, and she's sailing to a home she's never lived in after something the family only calls Father's great disappointment.

So she does what you do when nobody's paying attention. She takes notes.

There are the Hattenswillers in their pointy hats, who greet her politely every single time and whose words she has never once been able to make out. There's the man from Cabin 21, who sits in the same deckchair in the same white suit and dark glasses every day, and who doesn't react when she falls over his legs. And there are five men in smart suits and bottle-green hats who stop talking whenever anyone walks past.

Then, from the staircase down to the hold, she hears it. A long, sad cry, rising and falling, like a wolf singing to the moon. The saddest song Corby has ever heard.

The doors to the hold are locked and only the captain has the key.

Between the chapters, somebody else gets a turn to speak. A small, muddled voice that thinks it's trapped inside a hollow tree, and that the forest is swaying, and that it would like to see the sun again. Your reader will work out the truth of that a good while before Corby does, which is a lovely feeling to give a seven year old.

The pages from Hoffendinck's Guide are the other treat. Spitting whelks. Blue-tailed goobies. A mermaid so hideous she's said to frighten fishermen to death with one look.

It's a sad book in a comfortable way rather than an upsetting one. Nothing frightening happens in the opening chapters, although whatever is down there is hungry and thirsty and says so, and a softer reader may mind that more than any villain.

What to read next

For the world rather than the mystery, Paul Stewart wrote Fergus Crane as well, about a boy at school on a ship, taught by rather peculiar teachers, who gets a message at his bedroom window telling him he's in great danger.