Horton Halfpott

Tom Angleberger's Horton Halfpott is a very silly Victorian mystery for 8 year olds, and it begins with a corset.

What happens

M'Lady Luggertuck has worn hers pulled tighter than a hangman's noose for as long as anyone at Smugwick Manor can remember. It is probably why she is one of the worst people in the world. Then one morning, for a reason nobody ever discovers, she tells her maid to leave it a little loose.

The whole house feels it.

Footmen slouch. Maids scrub less thoroughly. Two elderly servants who have been in love for years are spotted holding hands in the garden. They call it the Loosening, and everything that happens next gets blamed on it.

Everything includes the theft of the Luggertuck Lump, the family's enormous, ugly, possibly priceless diamond, which looks quite a lot like a rotten potato.

Horton Halfpott is the kitchen boy. He washes six hundred and fifty two spoons in a day and gets cracked on the head with a wooden spoon for putting the firewood down too loudly. He also cannot break a rule, not even to take a cake on the one hour a week the servants eat properly, because the single penny he earns is all the money his family has and his father has been ill for a long time.

So of course he is the one everybody suspects.

The pleasure of it is the narrator, who will not leave you alone. He tells you off for judging Horton by his appearance. He refuses to say what Celia Sylvan-Smythe is thinking, on the grounds that she is owed her privacy. He keeps referring you to other M'Lady Luggertuck adventures, which do not exist. Words get Capital Letters for no reason at all.

And then England's greatest detective arrives, seven feet tall and four hundred pounds, in a magnificent carriage that is really a sultan's outhouse on wheels. He has not solved anything by detecting in years. His plan is to hide behind the furniture overnight and wait for the thief to put the diamond back.

The comedy has a mean streak, so have a look first if your reader is sensitive to that. The cook hits Horton about the head almost every time she is in the room. The servants are deliberately half starved on watered gruel and one bread crust. Horton's sick father and the tin can his mother keeps the doctor money in are the reason he puts up with all of it. It is all played as comedy, and the narrator is quite clear that none of it is fair.

What to read next

If they come out of this wanting another detective who is mostly wrong, try The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, where a boy who has read fifty eight detective novels twice over is about to discover how little they help.