When Did You See Her Last?

Lemony Snicket's When Did You See Her Last is a mystery for 9 year olds, narrated by a not-quite-thirteen-year-old detective who admits on the first page that he got the whole thing wrong.

What happens

He tells you flat out. There was a town, a statue, and a person who had been kidnapped. He was hired to bring that person back. He was wrong about all of it, and the question he asked was the wrong one. This, he says, is the account of the second.

Snicket is living at a hotel called the Lost Arms, in a room called a suite which is not a suite, with a chaperone called S. Theodora Markson. He doesn't know what the S stands for. Theodora cooks by warming shop-bought food on a hotplate, and this morning she served him a fried egg on a towel from the bathroom.

That's the humour, and it's completely deadpan. He never once tells you it's funny.

The town is Stain'd-by-the-Sea, which is no longer by the sea and hardly a town. Half-empty shops. Boarded-up houses. A diner he still hasn't tried. Then one morning there are posters on every lamppost and every mailbox, and from the moving car he can only read one word on them. MISSING.

The girl is Cleo Knight. In her photograph everything around her is brand new and shiny, and the only things that aren't are her raspberry-coloured hat and the frown on her face, which he reckons she gets a lot of use out of.

A good deal of this book is really about words. Theodora says "skip tracer" when there's no time for it, then Snicket lists every synonym for annoying he can lay hands on, at exhausting length, and finishes by pointing out that doing so wasted time he didn't have. It's a joke about being irritating that is also, on purpose, irritating.

A couple of things to flag first. This is the second of four, and it assumes you already know about a girl called Ellington Feint, a statue of the Bombinating Beast and a villain called Hangfire. Your reader can follow it cold, but they'll be catching up as they go.

The world of it is deliberately bleak too. Nobody is looking after Snicket and he says so plainly, in the same flat tone he uses about the egg. There's a kidnapping, a villain who can imitate anybody's voice down a telephone, and a town that is quietly dying. Nothing is gory. The mood is dry and a bit unsettling, which some children find delicious and others find no fun at all.

What to read next

Snicket gets two more wrong questions after this one. Shouldn't You Be in School is the next, with a fire, a librarian, and the same admission on the first page that he has got it all wrong again.