The Secret Detectives
A fun children’s murder mystery set on a boat travelling from Calcutta to England.
I enjoyed this; it was a quick and easy read. It’s a murder mystery with three children as the detectives, so it’s fairly light and avoids any gore or violence.
It’s set on a boat travelling from Calcutta to England in the early twentieth century, and explores the racism and sexism that was common at the time. The three children have different races and family situations, and casual comments from the most privileged cause some tension – her dismissiveness of Indian people, and her assumptions about traditional parenting and mothering.
The plot also leans into it; the white passengers have Indian servants, who are initially dismissed as unimportant to the investigation – and only later do they realise they should have watched them more closely.
Overall an enjoyable read, and I admire the decision to pick a historically distressing setting, which was surely harder to write.
Plot summary
Isobel is sailing from India to England; an autistic young girl who’s parents have died, so she’s going to live with family in England. She doesn’t like people or adults, and wants to keep to herself during the voyage, initially unfriendly towards the family looking after her.
Early in the trip, while out on deck at night, she witnesses somebody push another person overboard. She proceeds to investigate with Sam (an Indian boy travelling with his academic father) and Letitia (the young daughter of the mother supervising her trip). She initially dislikes them both, but they become friends over the course of the investigation.
After several false leads, the ending is a bit anticlimactic. One of the men onboard is planning to explore space with his father’s inheritance – but the will gives the money to the oldest son, and the father had another son in India before the man was born.
The older brother wanted his inheritance, so the man lured him to the shop under false pretences and threw him overboard. He had the man pose as an Indian servant, so he wouldn’t be missed. When the children confront him, he confesses immediately and is arrested.
Favourite quotes
Page 165, when Lettie (Letitia) really touches a nerve:
“I do everything myself,” said Sam. “I am remarkably independent. I have had to be. My father isn’t the domestic sort, if any father is. I expect I’d be much lazier if my mother hadn’t died. You might be much more independent now, you know. Which would be a good thing.”
“That is a dreadful thing to say,” Lettie said, sternly. “You mustn’t be glad that people have passed on.”
“Glad!” Sam stared at her and put his condensed milk can down on the ground. “Glad!”
“Well – you said it might be a good thing…”
“Glad! There can be good things that happen because terrible things happened, you know! I can be pleased I learned to do all my own buttons and to run a newspaper because I never had a mother to stop me, and still never be glad that I haven’t had a mother since I was so small I can’t remember! Glad! I wouldn’t ever be glad!” It was the closest Sam had ever come to shouting, and Lettie looked as if she might cry.
“Things,” Isobel said, very carefully, trying her best to explain to Lettie (who would never understand, who had a mother who loved her, who had a father who missed her, who knew all about people). “Things are just a bit complicated.”
Page 175:
“Oh, I know we haven’t got anything to put in it yet. But give us time. God, give us time.”
“That’s exactly what we haven’t got,” said Isobel.
“Time. We’ll be in Suez in two days – and that’s the lunch bell, isn’t it?” It was, and it rang out clear and loud across the deck, and they looked at each other and felt the time slipping away from them all. It had never felt so precarious to any of them – and never would again, thought Isobel. If she had seen any art, or read any books, she might have thought of sand falling through an hourglass; but she had not, so she did not, and thought instead of earth falling through her fingers, and of water caught in cupped hands, evaporating away in the heat of the sun before you could pour it on the thirsty ground.