The Vanishing of Billy Buckle

Sally Gardner's The Vanishing of Billy Buckle is a fairy detective mystery for 8 year olds about a missing giant and the little girl he left behind.

What happens

Billy Buckle went off to play the bassoon at his old band's reunion gig. He left his daughter Primrose with Wings & Co. for the weekend. That was two weeks ago, and nobody's seen him since.

Primrose is only six, but she's already twice as tall as Emily and she's growing every day. She bangs her head on the ceilings, breaks her bed and needs seventeen towels after a shower. If the detectives don't find her dad soon, she won't fit through the shop door!

Then the shop gets up on its four iron legs and walks to the seaside overnight. Emily wakes to the sound of waves outside her window, and nobody can say why. Meanwhile a fortune-teller vanishes in the middle of a tea dance at Puddliepool-on-Sea, and in London two old ladies on mobility scooters have made off with a diamond worth seven million pounds.

The detectives are such good company. Emily is the sensible one, an ordinary girl who somehow became Keeper of the Keys. Fidget is a six-foot tortoiseshell cat who knits fish-shaped hats and can't get through a sentence without a fishy saying ("Rollmop me a herring!"). And Buster is a fairy who's been eleven for a hundred years and is every bit as grumpy as that sounds. (On his first afternoon at the seaside he manages to get arrested over the roller coaster.)

There's real feeling under all the jokes too. Primrose cries for her daddy. Emily, who has no parents of her own, lies awake worrying that the shop might one day walk off without her. It's a sweet and quite touching thread in a very silly story.

A heads-up for sensitive readers. This is a proper murder mystery as well as a giant hunt. An organ player is found under the ballroom stage with a knife in his back, and a villain's assistant is a former wrestler who once bit off an opponent's ear. It's all told with a wink rather than a shudder, but it is there.

What to read next

If they fall for this gang, Three Pickled Herrings is an earlier Wings & Co. case in the library. It opens with a gentleman floating up into the sky above his duck pond, while the detectives are still waiting for their very first client.