The Great Mouse Detective 6 – Basil and the Big Cheese Cook-Off

Basil and the Big Cheese Cook-Off, from Eve Titus and Cathy Hapka's Great Mouse Detective series, is a detective story for 6 year olds set in Paris in 1895, with a cast entirely made of mice.

What happens

Basil of Baker Street lives in a mouse town built in the cellar underneath Sherlock Holmes. He and Dr Dawson creep upstairs most evenings to hide in the study and listen to Holmes talking about coded messages and handwriting, and that is where Basil learned his trade.

Dawson tells the story, and Dawson mostly wants his dinner.

A note arrives from Paris, in French, which Dawson cannot read. Basil reads it, puts it in his cape, says nothing at all, and announces they are leaving at dawn.

Their old university friend Alain runs the International Cheese Cook-Off, and somebody has been slipping threatening notes into his apron pocket. Three of them, on three mornings. Cancel, or else. The third one threatens every mouse in Paris.

The cook-off is in two days. Alain will cancel if Basil can't sort it.

Here's what makes this fun. Basil interviews one cook, hears one description of a tall stranger with a bony forehead, and declares the case more than half solved. He names his old enemy. He is completely certain.

He's also wrong, and the handwriting proves it, and your reader gets to enjoy watching the world's greatest detective start again from nothing with a day left.

The Paris of it is lovely. They hitch a lift on a milkman's cart, stow away on a train, cross the Channel on the ferry, and look up at Monsieur Eiffel's new tower. There's a mouse hotel inside the walls of the opera house with a bellhop and a fully booked lobby.

Everything is mouse-sized, and half the jokes come from that. Notes are written in shortpaw. A mirror slid under a door is state-of-the-art surveillance. Dawson identifies cheeses by smell with his eyes shut.

There's a bit of danger, mostly of the being-eaten sort, and it stays comic. A dog pins Basil under one paw and a passing stranger pokes it with an umbrella. The actual plot involves a plan to poison the cheese, which sounds worse than it plays. Nobody is hurt in the part your reader reads to get there.

For a six year old this is a proper mystery with real suspects and real reasoning, no gore, and no menace that lasts more than a page.

What to read next

If they take to Basil, Basil and the Royal Dare is next in the library. Holmes has gone abroad, Basil has nothing to do and no appetite, and then a messenger turns up from the mice who live in the royal household.