Alan Bradley (born 1938) is a Canadian mystery writer known for his Flavia de Luce series, which began with the acclaimed The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.
Bradley was born in 1938 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Alongside his two older sisters, Bradley was raised roughly 100 kilometres east of Toronto in the small town of Cobourg, Ontario. His mother brought up the children alone after Bradley's father left the family when Bradley was a toddler.[1] Bradley learned to read at an early age, partly because he was a sickly child who spent a lot of time in bed.[2] However, Bradley confesses to having been a "very bad student",[1] particularly in high school,[2] spending his free time reading in the local cemetery because he felt he didn't fit in.
After completing his education, Bradley worked in Cobourg as a radio and television engineer, designing and building electronic systems. He then worked briefly for Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto (now Ryerson University), before moving to Saskatoon to take a job at the University of Saskatchewan in 1969. There he helped develop a broadcasting studio, where he worked as Director of Television Engineering for 25 years. He took an early retirement from the university in 1994 in order to become a full-time writer.[1]
Bradley had been interested in writing his entire life. However, he began to take it more seriously in his early 30s after moving to Saskatoon. There, he joined several writing groups and began spending time with local writers.
He wrote several short stories that were read on CBC Radio and published in literary magazines. Following his early retirement from the University of Saskatchewan in 1994, Bradley and his wife Shirley moved to Kelowna, British Columbia for her work, while Bradley focused full-time on writing. He wrote multiple screenplays over the course of nine years. Then, during the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park Fire, many homes neighbouring Bradley's were destroyed, although his was spared from the fire. The experience inspired him to do something different, and he began focusing on memoirs instead of screenplays.[1] He wrote a non-fiction book called Ms Holmes of Baker Street and a memoir called The Shoebox Bible.[2] In 2006, he began writing his first novel.
Soon after, Bradley's wife was listening to CBC Radio as Louise Penny, a Canadian mystery author, discussed the Debut Dagger fiction competition, run by the U.K. Crime Writers' Association and sponsored by the Orion Publishing Group in Britain. The competition requires that entrants submit the first chapter and a synopsis of a murder mystery. Bradley's wife encouraged him to write something new about the "girl on the camp stool", a minor character that had emerged in the novel Bradley was working on. In early 2007, Bradley entered the Dagger contest by submitting fifteen pages about the "girl on the camp stool" character, now named Flavia de Luce. These pages, which took only a few days to write and several weeks of polishing, would become the basis of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.[1] Bradley set the book in England despite having never visited it.[2] In June 2007, two judges from the contest contacted Bradley's agent in Canada to express interest in publishing the proposed book; they also inadvertently informed him that Bradley was the winner of the competition. A bidding war ensued, and on June 27, 2007, Bradley sold Orion the rights for three books in Britain. Within several days, Doubleday had purchased the Canadian rights and Bantam Books the U.S. rights. At age 69, Bradley left North America for the first time when he went to London, England to pick up the Dagger award on July 5, 2007.
Upon his return to Canada after the award ceremony, Bradley took a few weeks off, and then spent seven months turning the submitted fifteen pages into a full-length novel. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie was published in the UK in January 2009 and in Canada in February 2009.[1] The book has since developed into a series of novels about young Flavia de Luce solving various crimes in a 1950s village. The second installment (The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag) was published in March 2010,[3] the third (A Red Herring without Mustard) in February 2011,[4] the fourth (I Am Half-Sick of Shadows) in December 2011,[5] and the fifth (Speaking from Among the Bones) in January 2013.[6] The sixth book, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, was released in early 2014.[7] The series has been extended to ten books, up from an original order of six.[7]
In 2012, director Sam Mendes optioned the Flavia de Luce series, which he intends to develop into TV movies.[8]
Since selling their home in Kelowna, British Columbia in 2009, Bradley and his wife Shirley have been traveling, hoping to spend time living in various places and visiting every country that is publishing his books.[1]
Volver a
HOME
Volver a
LIBROS
Volver al principio de la página
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a mystery by Alan Bradley published in 2009. Set in the English countryside in 1950, it features Flavia de Luce, an 11-year-old amateur sleuth who pulls herself away from her beloved chemistry lab in order to clear her father in a murder investigation. First-time novelist, Bradley, wrote the book after winning the 2007 Debut Dagger Award and selling the publishing rights in 3 countries based on the first chapter and a synopsis. Well received by critics as an old-fashioned mystery featuring an unforgettable protagonist, the novel has won multiple awards and is the first in a proposed 10-book series.
As the novel opens, Flavia Sabina de Luce schemes revenge against her 2 older sisters, Ophelia (17) and Daphne (13) who have locked her inside a closet in Buckshaw, the family's country manor home located in the English village of Bishop's Lacey. Flavia may have braces and pigtails like a typical 11-year-old girl, but she is also a brilliant amateur chemist with a specialty in poisons and a fully equipped, personal laboratory on the top floor of her home. With her scientific notebook at-the-ready, she steals her oldest sister's lipstick, adds poison ivy extract, and then waits, eagerly anticipating changes in Ophelia's complexion. Flavia is especially jealous of her oldest sister because at 17, she is the only one of the 3 girls with memories of their mother, Harriet, a free spirit who disappeared on a mountaineering adventure in Tibet 10 years earlier and is presumed dead. Harriet's disappearance devastated their father, Colonel Haviland "Jacko" de Luce, a philatelist and former amateur illusionist who spends most of his time poring over his stamp collection. The family shares their home with loyal retainer Arthur Wellesley Dogger, who once saved Colonel de Luce's life during the war and now works as Buckshaw's gardener, suffering frequent bouts of memory loss and hallucinations due to posttraumatic stress disorder from his time as a prisoner of war.
Mysterious events begin to occur when Mrs. Mullet, Buckshaw's housekeeper and cook, discovers a dead jack snipe on the porch with a Penny Black stamp pierced through its beak. Then, Flavia and Dogger overhear a heated argument between Colonel de Luce and a red-headed stranger who shortly turns up dead in the family cucumber patch. When Colonel de Luce is arrested for the crime, Flavia takes to her bicycle, Gladys, and begins an investigation in the village of Bishop's Lacey, interviewing suspects, gathering clues, and compiling research at the library, always staying ahead of Inspector Hewitt and the police department. As she single-handedly solves the crime, she uncovers the truth behind a 20-year old apparent suicide at Colonel de Luce's alma mater, Greyminster. Both the suicide victim, housemaster and Latin scholar Grenville Twining, and the red-headed stranger in the cucumber patch, Horace "Bony" Bonepenny, uttered "Vale" as a last word. The trail connecting their deaths also includes political intrigue, rare Ulster Avenger stamps, sleight of hand, theft, blackmail, and murder.
Bradley describes the theme as "youthful idealism" and how far it can take someone "if it's not stamped out, as it so often is." Thinking back to his own childhood, he identifies with Flavia's 11-year-old zeal, remembering the "feeling of being absolutely unstoppable," capable of anything. He explains, "when you're that age, you sometimes have a great burning enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me - that world of the 11-year-old that is so quickly lost." Reviewer Francisca Goldsmith notes this theme as well, suggesting that readers "may come away with a slightly altered view of what is possible for a headstrong girl to achieve."
The writing style in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie has been described as reminiscent of the "Golden Age of crime writing," influenced by the author's appreciation for the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, W. J. Burley, and Josephine Tey. Reviewer Lucy Clark compared Bradley's style to that of Agatha Christie, calling The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie a "delightfully old-fashioned mystery." Kirkus Reviews compared the book's "intellectual asides" to that of Jonathan Gash.
In the spring of 2006, Bradley had been working on a different book set in the 1950s when the plot developed to include a detective character arriving at a country house to find a little girl in the driveway, sitting "on a camp stool doing something with a notebook and a pencil." That little girl was Flavia. Bradley explains "she walked onto the page of another book I was writing, and simply hijacked the story." "I can't take any credit for Flavia at all," he says. "She just materialized."
When Bradley's wife heard author Louise Penny, a 2004 Debut Dagger award runner-up, on the radio talking about the British crime-writing competition, she encouraged her husband to enter. She advised him to abandon the original book he had been writing and "send the stuff about the girl on the camp stool," instead. The competition, which is open to anyone who has not yet published a novel commercially, requires would-be novelists to submit the first 3,000 words (or less), along with a 500-1,000 word synopsis. Writing the draft of the first chapter "took Bradley just a couple of days, but he then spent weeks polishing it, only just sneaking the first pages of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie in under the final deadline."
Winning the 2007 Debut Dagger "based on a chapter and a synopsis,"[14] he "signed a three-book deal with Orion for a crime series centering on 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce."[14] Through agent Denise Bukowski, he also auctioned U.S. rights to Bantam Books and Canadian rights to Doubleday Canada, securing three separate three-book deals for a proposed six-book series based on a 17-page submission.[15] Calling the submission fresh and original, Kristin Cochrane of Doubleday Canada admitted "we've rarely, if ever bought fiction on so little material."[9] Orion's Bill Massey agreed, remarking that "it was just a chapter, but it was so outstanding that it made me realise he is a real talent, and that he had an idea that could be a really terrific series."[14] Massey further explained that "Flavia just seemed so alive on the page, and her voice was so distinctive and engaging."[9] After Bradley picked up the Dagger award in London on his first trip to England, the Canadian author took a few weeks off and then "sat down and wrote Sweetness in seven months flat."[2]
Critics almost universally praised the novel upon its publication, primarily citing the compelling character portrayal of 11-year-old lead detective, Flavia de Luce. Reviewers have called Flavia brilliant,[7][16] bold,[16] irresistible,[7] incorrigible,[7] precocious,[16][17][18] adorable,[16] and unique.[18] For Canadian Literature, Beverly Haun wrote "Flavia is a gem of a character; her precocity offset by her emotional vulnerability makes a winning combination."[19] Marilyn Stasio for The New York Times Book Review agreed, proclaiming Flavia "impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist," but "most endearing as a little girl who has learned how to amuse herself in a big lonely house."[20] Reviewer Paula Todd for The Globe and Mail (Canada), however, was not impressed. Calling Flavia "too much of a caricature to appeal to the subtlety-seeking adult mystery reader," she declared the language "often tedious" and the references "too obscure" for younger readers.[21] Todd wrote "the burning question a few chapters in is not whodunit, but who wants to read it? To whom, exactly, is this book meant to appeal?"[21] Other reviewers have noted strong appeal to a wide range of readers. Michele Leber for Library Journal noted "appeal for cozy lovers and well beyond"[18] while Francisca Goldsmith for School Library Journal suggested "mystery fans, Anglophiles, and science buffs will delight"[4] in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. Judy Coon for Booklist insisted "only those who dislike precocious young heroines with extraordinary vocabulary and audacious courage can fail to like this amazingly entertaining book."[17]
| Award | Year | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Agatha Award, Best First Novel | 2009 | Winner[22] |
| Alex Award | 2010 | Nominated[23] |
| Amelia Bloomer List, Young Adult Fiction | 2010 | Among 18 winners[24] |
| Anthony Award, Best First Novel | 2010 | Nominated[25] |
| Arthur Ellis Awards, Best First Novel | 2010 | Winner[26] |
| Barry Award, Best First Novel | 2010 | Winner[27] |
| Debut Dagger Award | 2007 | Winner[11] |
| Dilys Award | 2010 | Winner[28] |
| Macavity Awards, Best First Mystery Novel | 2010 | Winner[29] |
| Spotted Owl Award | 2010 | Winner[30] |
| YALSA Best Books for Young Adults | 2010 | Among 90 winners[31] |
| YRCA, Senior Division | 2012 | Nominated |
Resumen, crítica y contexto tomados de Internet (e.g. de Wikipedia), indicando explicitamente la URL y la fecha
Volver a HOME
Volver a
LIBROS
Volver al principio de la página
Resumen, crítica y contexto tomados de Internet (e.g. de Wikipedia), indicando explicitamente la URL y la fecha
Volver a HOME
Volver a
LIBROS
Volver al principio de la página
Resumen, crítica y contexto tomados de Internet (e.g. de Wikipedia), indicando explicitamente la URL y la fecha
Volver a HOME
Volver a
LIBROS
Volver al principio de la página