Sam the Man & the Secret Detective Club Plan

Frances O'Roark Dowell's Sam the Man & the Secret Detective Club Plan is a gentle mystery for 6 year olds about a boy who starts a detective club before he has a single case.

What happens

Sam Graham gets into detective work by accident. His sister loses a stripy sock, and over dinner Sam works out that their dad folds the laundry in the same order every time and was watching the football when he got to the socks.

So the missing sock is probably balled up inside another pair. And it is.

That's the level we're at, and it's perfect. Sam's reasoning is proper reasoning, just about small things a six year old actually cares about.

Buoyed up, he decides to start a club. Gavin, his best mate, signs up once Sam promises they'll take on bigger cases than socks. Then they go recruiting.

Emily is the cleverest in the class and knows everything about birds. Marja has the best handwriting and, crucially, binoculars. Rashid is the one who can do seventeen take away six without blinking. Will is picked in case they ever need someone strong, or tall.

Watching second graders decide what a detective needs is very funny. Gavin's first entry on the list is that a detective should be good at guessing.

Then comes the snag. A club needs somewhere to meet and somewhere secret. Sam's neighbour Mr Stockfish, who he collects every afternoon to go and see their chickens, suggests hiding it in plain sight by pretending to be a different sort of club altogether.

So the Bird-Watchers Club is born, meets in the school library, and spends the first five minutes of every meeting learning bird vocabulary in case anyone asks.

The cases, when they finally arrive, come out of the lost property box. A red jacket with its name tag peeled off, its label cut out, and a smell like chemicals and wet chickens. Also a six-foot stuffed snake that nobody has claimed.

Why would you cut the label out of your own coat? That's a proper question, and the club takes it seriously.

Nothing frightening happens. Nobody is in danger. The chapters are short, most of the page is talking, and the humour comes from small children being extremely reasonable with each other.

It's a good fit for a reader who has just started chapter books on their own, and a lovely one to read aloud with a younger sibling listening in.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, the Goofballs are in the library too. Crazy Case of Missing Thunder has four friends who have run their agency since first grade, and a rich boy whose horse has vanished.