★★★★☆ Go, Team Weird!

Premeditated Myrtle

Elizabeth C. Bunce

Probably when you were a kid there were times when you felt you were not like other kids. (I may be wrong, but I'm guessing this is a universal human experience.) Myrtle Hardcastle (the hero of Elizabeth C. Bunce's Myrtle Hardcastle series is a precocious 12-year-old girl, the daughter of Prosecutor Arthur Hardcastle. His position is something like that of a District Attorney in the modern US legal system -- a government lawyer whose job is to prosecute criminals in court. As Elizabeth C. Bunce explains in an Author's Note, such Prosecutors were a relatively new thing in England in 1893.

Myrtle is motherless -- her mother, who studied to be a physician, died of cancer some years ago. Myrtle's ambition is to be a detective or prosecutor or something like that. (She probably knows precisely what she wants -- that would be like Myrtle, but she was not entirely explicit about her plans, hence my vagueness.) To this end she diligently studies criminology. She has a governess, Miss Judson, who encourages her. It becomes obvious very early on that Myrtle would like Miss Judson to become Mrs Hardcastle and her stepmother.

To her father's chagrin, Myrtle is not interested in girls her age.

They looked on me as some sort of contagious specimen, and were quick with “advice” about my hair or dress, which did not seem kindly meant at all. For my part, I felt they showed a dismal lack of interest in viscera. Father was constantly after me to mingle more with them, but they had declined all my invitations to join us for an afternoon of tea and dissection.

As a former child with an interest in viscera as keen as Myrtle's, I took to her immediately. (She would not have liked me, as she is, alas, a bit of a xenophobe -- she refers to the "ridiculous American accent" of one of her neighbors. Of course, anti-American prejudice was entirely acceptable in Victorian England, as it still is in the modern UK.)

Myrtle's spinster neighbor Miss Wodehouse dies unexpectedly, under what appear to Myrtle (but to no one else) to be suspicious circumstances. Myrtle pokes her nose in, and in, and yet further in, and eventually it is determined that Miss Wodehouse was murdered. The murder investigation is the main plot, and Bunce keeps it lively. Myrtle is clever and very, very nosy and always good for a laugh. Bunce also introduces a bunch of additional characters who I feel we are likely to see in further novels.

This was fun, and I plan to continue reading the series.

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