Our February Children’s Book of the Month is the intriguing Arsenic For Tea. Author Robin Stevens reveals her obsession with crime novels and introduces her Wells and Wong mysteries.
I’ve been obsessed with crime novels since I discovered them as a child.
I’m a very curious person. I just can’t help myself. I need to know things – everything! – and a secret that I don’t have the key to itches at me like an insect bite.
I’m also a very honest person. Trying to lie makes me feel sweaty and weird. As a kid I couldn’t even walk out of a store with an extra penny sweet without wanting to cry. I don’t think I could ever commit a really unpleasant crime, and so for most of my life I’ve been trying to work out what on earth would make anyone else do it.
I’ve been obsessed with crime novels, both as a reader and as a writer, since I discovered them as a child. Sometimes I try to write a book without a murder in it, and then halfway through the first draft I stop and realise that EVERYTHING would be better if someone ended up dead.
So there’s no surprise that I’ve ended up being the author of a series of murder mysteries, the Wells & Wong Mysteries. What does surprise some people is that I write them for children. ‘But . . . are you allowed to do that?’ someone nervously asked me at a party once. Happily, so far the answer to that has been a resounding yes. My publishers, both in the UK and the US, have been incredibly supportive of my books, and all of the feedback I’ve had from parents and teachers of readers has been extremely positive.
There’s recently been a big upsurge in the number of really great detective novels for children and I’m proud to be a part of it. The Sesame Seade books, Helen Moss’s Adventure Island, this year’s upcoming The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow and many more – they all feature smart kids taking control to solve crime, and I think that’s a hugely positive and exciting thing for young readers.
I wrote Murder Most Unladylike because I remember being nine, and being fascinated by big questions about life and death. I loved Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle because they were gruesome and strange and exciting and they made me think – but it disappointed me that I couldn’t see myself in those books. There weren’t any kids – or if kids were there, they were victims, or scaredy-cats, or not very smart. I couldn’t understand it. I knew that I would be an excellent detective. I could hide in places that adults could never fit, I could piece together clues at least as well as Poirot and, best of all, all of the adults would be so busy underestimating me that they would never suspect what I was really up to.
So I decided to write a book where Holmes and Watson were children, and that was where my heroines Daisy and Hazel came from. They started as a very simple detective and sidekick duo, but as I wrote them, Hazel stopped being just a shadow and became Daisy’s equal partner. They’re very different: pretty, confident Daisy is an insider who seems just the same as every other English aristocrat, and Hazel, who was sent from Hong Kong to England by her father to go to school, is a quiet, shy outsider who tends to be dismissed by the people she meets. But there’s more to both of them than meets the eye and together they make a formidable detective team.
I want the crimes in them to be real, but for the books themselves to feel safe, like puzzles…
My mysteries are set in the 1930s, with all of the gentle, nostalgic conventions that I adore in golden age detective fiction, and I love writing them. The first book in the Wells & Wong series, Murder Most Unladylike, takes place at Hazel and Daisy’s boarding school, and Arsenic for Tea, the second, takes place at Daisy’s big country house. I want the crimes in them to be real, but for the books themselves to feel safe, like puzzles, something as warm and delicious as scones for tea. I think a good detective novel can be enjoyed by readers of all ages – and I hope that you have fun with both my whodunits and the bunbreaks that go with them.
Robin Stevens for Waterstones.com/blog
You can find Robin Stevens on twitter: @redbreastedbird