The Murderer’s Ape

The Murderer's Ape by Jakob Wegelius is a long, beautifully told mystery for 9 year olds, narrated by a gorilla who cannot speak but understands every word you say.

What happens

She tells you so herself on the first page. She's an ape. She was chained as a small thing on a cold stone floor and sold on more than once. She has learned to read, to write and to run a ship's engine.

Now she works a cargo boat with the Chief. He isn't her owner. They're comrades, and she says so carefully, because people keep assuming.

Then the money runs out in Lisbon and a pale man in a hat offers them a job. Six crates of ceramic tiles, collected at night from an abandoned quay miles up a river. The pay is far too good, and Sally Jones can smell that he's frightened.

What's in the crates is not tiles. The men who load them have revolvers. The boat goes down on the rocks with everything they own inside it.

Then, back on a Lisbon quayside, the pale man runs, the Chief chases him, and he goes over the edge into the water.

Sally Jones saw exactly what happened. She cannot tell a single person.

That's the whole ache of it. How do you speak up for someone when nobody believes you can even follow the question? People look at her and see a dangerous animal or a zoo exhibit, and before long she's sleeping in a pigeon loft because the one man who might have helped has decided not to risk it.

The writing is patient and plain and quietly gorgeous. Trams, gas lamps, wet paving stones, a woman singing from an open window. Your reader gets Lisbon as a real place rather than a backdrop.

It isn't a quick read and isn't meant to be. It suits a child who likes to sink into a long book over weeks. The story hangs on a death, a false accusation and a prison sentence, and the world it moves through has thieves and cruelty in it. One line about the women working the harbour alleys, and the word she uses for the people who first caught her, are very much of their time.

What to read next

For a child who takes to that, Katherine Rundell's Rooftoppers has the same stubbornness in it. A baby is found floating in a cello case after a shipwreck, raised by a man who knows nothing about children, and grows up refusing the official version of what happened to her mother.