Book Review - Alan Bradley's What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust
What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust by Alan Bradley
Published by: Bantam
Publication Date: September 3rd, 2024
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy
Flavia is doing what she does best, rattling around Buckshaw and Bishop's Lacey on her trusty steed Gladys looking for anything she can investigate. Who knows, with any luck there might be a murder. Sometimes though it's dangerous to get what you wish for. Major Greyleigh is a retired civil servant who is a bit of a recluse. Flavia doesn't know that her beloved housekeeper, Mrs. Mullet, has been checking up on the Major and making sure he's well fed. Which is how Mrs. Mullet ends up the prime suspect in his apparent murder. His final meal consisted of some rather poisonous mushrooms, a type of poisoning Flavia has longed to investigate for years. Flavia knows that there's no way Mrs. Mullet would kill a man on purpose, which means it's time to investigate. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what her annoying cousin Undine wants to help Flavia with. Thinking she's ditched the nefarious nuisance Flavia breaks into the Major's house and makes quite a few startling discoveries. The first is that while yes, he was a civil servant, that's an umbrella term that can cover a multitude of sins, because he was actually a hangman. A hangman that kept little trophies of all his victims. Fetishes of the departed. Talk about squick. Although Undine, who Flavia didn't lose, thinks they're rather fascinating. Though Flavia, having far more experience than the ubiquitous Undine, finds this to be only one line of questioning. Undine doesn't understand that after years of experience Flavia knows not to put all of her eggs in one basket. Especially once Mrs. Mullett is cleared Flavia has the distinct feeling that the Major and his death is being hushed up from on high. Someone wants all of this to go away, which is what makes Flavia even more interested. Why else would the police cede the case to the military? There are still Americans stationed at the local air base, Leathcote, and Flavia plies what wiles she has to get a little help in sneaking onto the base. What she finds there changes everything. Her life is upended, her future looks different, and if there's one thing she realizes it's that maybe it's time to grow up. Maybe it's time to reconsider her priorities and forge her own path. Though obviously if that path is strewn with dead bodies that would be brilliant.
I have been a fan of Flavia de Luce since day one. Just look to my signed first edition for my bona fides. Which means that I have strong opinions on this series. Of course you're wondering, when haven't I had strong opinions, which is valid, but this is a series with a cast of characters I've been living with for fifteen years, which if I'm right on the aging, means I've been reading these books for longer than Flavia's been alive... So when something doesn't sit right with me I obsess over it. And while I've had smaller issues crop up over the years with regard to this series, like why send Flavia to Canada at all if she'd return so quickly or what happened to her tutor or why is Undine so insufferable, there are two that have really stuck in my craw. The first is why did the series end after the tenth volume? Yes, ten is a nice number to end on and a wedding is always a nice stopping point, but with Flavia and Dogger setting up their own detective agency at the end of The Grave's a Fine and Private Place to have it really go nowhere with no resolution in The Golden Tresses of the Dead made for a lackluster finish. It just seemed like the series called time and this was what we were left with, an unplanned ending. But more importantly the way Flavia's father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, died of pneumonia offstage in Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, has always pissed me off. It just didn't work on any level. I mean, why even kill him? If it was to provide an emotional punch or to set Flavia adrift, well, I'm sorry, but Dogger was more a dad to her than the Colonel ever was. He was always too busy with his stamps and his possibly performative mourning to even bother raising his children. And you might say I'm being harsh on the man, but, given what I now know, maybe I'm not being harsh enough. So to recap, my issues are why end on a book that didn't feel like the end and why kill of Colonel de Luce. This book so wonderfully addresses these issues just by its existence. Because here it is, an eleventh book with a twelfth on the way and this FEELS like the finale Flavia deserves. She breaks with the secretive spycraft of the past and decides to embrace what the future has to offer. And as for those secrets? Whoa boy, spoiler alert, her father isn't dead. I KNEW that pneumonia seemed overly convenient! And it was! A ruse to put him into hiding which makes me hate him more for putting his family through that grief but also, I feel redeemed for flagging his death as being too convenient. I was right! And yes, you might think that I get great joy over shouting this from the rooftops. But it's not because I'm right it's because I knew these characters and this world so well that I could sense a disturbance in the force. A disturbance that has since been fixed and it has put my heart at ease. I feel whole. I don't point to this series and say, I love it but... I can now point to this series and simply say I love it. Because I do. Now unreservedly. Murdered hangman and all.
Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd by Alan Bradley
