Three Pickled Herrings

Sally Gardner's Three Pickled Herrings is a fairy detective mystery for 8 year olds where somebody in town is helping themselves to other people's luck.

What happens

Wings & Co., the fairy detective agency, has been open for five whole months. Not one case has come through the door. (Emily is starting to worry she'll be all grown up before one does!)

Then three turn up at once. Sir Walter Cross, who never picked a losing horse, rises into the air above his duck pond in a cloud of purple smoke and doesn't come back down safely. A tailor called Mr Rollo has lost every customer and his dream house is sinking into a marsh. And a bride wakes on her wedding morning to find everything ruined.

The detectives are a lovely odd bunch. Emily is nine and Keeper of the Keys, which sounds grand until you learn the keys hardly ever do what she asks. Fidget is a cat as tall as a man who knits everything in the shape of a fish. Buster is a fairy who has been eleven for a hundred years and is VERY grumpy about it.

Fidget's sayings are half the fun. Everything is a "pickled herring" or "spot on the fishcake", and he speaks just enough Dog to say "put a fishbone in it". Emily takes notes like a proper detective because her book says she should. Buster, meanwhile, eats an entire trifle (the only thing at the wedding house that wasn't wrecked).

There's a witness too. Sir Walter's little dachshund, Doughnut, keeps rolling over and playing dead. Is he trying to tell them something?

You get to peek at the troublemakers a little before the detectives do, so the fun is in watching Emily, Fidget and Buster catch up.

It's worth knowing that the story opens with a death. Sir Walter falls from high above his garden in the first chapter and is found by the pond. It isn't gory, and it's told more like a firework show gone wrong, but a detective does call it murder. There's also a quick grown-up joke about one character's wishes for a new figure. A child who's easily unsettled might want to read chapter one with you. A reader who loves a silly mystery will be off and away.

What to read next

If they want more of Fidget and his fishy knitting, The Vanishing of Billy Buckle is the case that comes after this one. A giant has gone missing and left his daughter with the detectives, and she's getting taller every day.