Speaking From Among the Bones (Flavia de Luce, Book Five), by Alan Bradley
Near the end of Speaking From Among the Bones, Inspector Hewitt visits Flavia in the Buckshaw drawing room after she’s nosy-parkered her way, again, into solving the latest murder:
“Right, then,” Inspector Hewitt was saying. “Let’s have it.”
I couldn’t help thinking how much progress he had made since we had first met nine months ago, upon which occasion he had sent me to fetch the tea.
There was hope for the man yet.
What follows is my favorite part of the book, where Flavia gleefully does the wrap-up in her “humble, jolly-girl-well-met kind of voice” (that does not fool anyone in the slightest), while the exasperated but fond Inspector takes notes and tries to delicately balance himself between being supportive of her intellect and disapproving of her wild lack of self-preservation.
Something about their relationship breaks my heart (on Flavia’s end at least). I find myself reading between the lines every time they are together, hunting for Inspector Hewitt’s true thoughts, suffusing his character with emotional nuances that Flavia fails to pick up but that I’m sure are there. Flavia needs a hero in her life, someone to look up to, who will indulge her but also impose limits - how much is Inspector Hewitt investing in being that person? Because we only see him from her point of view, and because she finds him so inscrutable, I’m not sure we’ll ever know - but watching them develop as a pair is one of the best parts of this series. And this stuff is even better with the addition of his wife Antigone, who seems to recognize Flavia’s lonely little-girl-crush for what it is and is so, so kind about it.
The man is fighting a losing battle, of course. Even when he goes out on a limb and explicitly tells her not to put herself in danger, she isn’t hearing it. After he tells her to remember there are dangerous killers on the loose, she practically swoons with excitement:
My heart accelerated.
Dangerous killers on the loose! The words to which every amateur sleuth lives in eternal hope of hearing. Ever since I first heard them spoken on the wireless by Philip Odell in “The Case of the Missing Marbles,” I had longed for someone to say them to me. And now they had. “Dangerous killers on the loose!” I wanted to shake the Inspector’s hand….
My cup of crime runneth over, I thought.
Where would we be if the amateur detectives of the world decided things were getting to dangerous and they’d better stay in for the night?
Flavia is under an inordinate amount of stress in this installment. Her sister is getting married, marking her passage out of Flavia’s life as far as she’s concerned, and Flavia is just starting to realize she doesn’t want her to go. Her family’s money troubles have come to a head and Buckshaw is actually For Sale. Another huge part of her life she is on the verge of losing (including her laboratory!). Her father seems even more like a ghost, like a defeated man. All of this probably accounts for the more melancholy tone in this novel; even though Flavia’s humorous narrative is still whip-smart and the characters are all crazy-quirky, Flavia’s worries are starting to eclipse her optimism and disrupt the natural order of things.
Naturally, the murder she has to solve provides her distraction - during the opening of Saint Tancred’s tomb on the 500-year anniversary of his death, to which Flavia has inserted herself without permission, she discovers not an uncorrupted saint’s body but a murdered church organist-- but even though it makes up the bulk of the story, it’s not THE story. (And to be honest, I found it a little hard to follow, what with the inclusion of a mysterious holy artifact, two other amateur detectives Flavia must contend with, Flavia’s side obsession with testing everybody’s blood, and a whole host of new-ish Bishop’s Lacey characters whose tangled histories intersect way too much with the case. I really needed that wrap-up at the end.) THE story, for me at least, is Flavia’s search to belong somewhere, even in her own family, her own village. And her then insistence that she be recognized and given credit for it.
As bad as things get, she is still irrepressible in her demand for attention. After her wrap-up, when everybody gets up and Inspector Hewitt casually and somewhat dismissively thanks her for her time, she wonders:
“Where are the trumpets?”
And that is the best thing about her.
*Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this eARC*