CBR14 BINGO: Cozy, because these books qualify as cozy mysteries, what with all the murders happening in this small village, always being discovered by an 11-year-old detective
When I first met Flavia de Luce in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I wasn’t 100% sure whether I liked her. After a couple more books, I had warmed to her, because the girl can really grow on a person. By the time I picked up The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, I was curious to see how my good friend Flavia was faring.
This novel begins on a distinctly solemn note. Having learned at the end of Speaking from Among the Bones that Harriet de Luce, Flavia’s adventurer mother, had been “found,” The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches opens with the de Luce family waiting at a train station for their mother to come home. I have to admit that, in a stunning display of child-like innocence, I hoped until the last possible second that Harriet was alive, but of course that couldn’t be the case. The family is in their Sunday best to perform the bleak task of collecting their matriarch’s body.
This would be enough for any 11-year-old to deal with; however, Flavia is a magnet for intrigue. She’s approached at the train station by a man in a long coat who wishes to speak to her about something vitally important (“Vitally? Anyone who used the word ‘vitally’ in everyday conversation could hardly be a villain.”). His mysterious message is to tell her father that “the Gamekeeper is in jeopardy.” It’s not long before said non-villain ends up under the train tracks, something Flavia can hardly be expected to investigate given that she is going to be busy burying her long-lost mother. (For that matter, she can hardly deliver cryptic warnings to her father, who is grieving the loss of his wife.)
More than any of the previous novels in the series, Dead in Their Vaulted Arches puts the mystery on the back burner to focus on character development and relationships. The author has been developing Flavia’s character over the course of the series (though, it’s worth noting that Flavia has not even aged a full year since the first novel), but the complexity of her relationships with her family and her growth as a person are highlighted in this book. In book 2, Flavia had been surprised to learn that she looks like Harriet; in book 5, her father tells her that she is exactly like Harriet; and as book 6 progresses, we go deeper into family history and learn more about the Flavia-Harriet connection. There also appears to have been much more to Harriet than Flavia has ever guessed. The big man Winston Churchill himself shows up at the train station to pay his respects, growling, “She was England, damn it.” What had Harriet been up to, and is Flavia somehow destined to follow in her footsteps?
The resentment that Flavia’s sisters, Daffy and Feely, feel toward their younger sibling becomes more understandable, but no less painful, as we learn more about Harriet. At one point, Feely tells Flavia, “Don’t do anything this afternoon to embarrass us.” Flavia is hurt and indignant: “As if I were a tramp at the kitchen door. I think it was the ‘us’ that hurt the most. Just one more of those little words with long shadows: two plain little letters, u and s, that transformed me from sister into an outsider.” By the end of the novel, the sisters will have even greater reason to resent Flavia.
This novel was thoughtful and sensitive, and at times I forgot I was reading a mystery. Harriet’s homecoming and Colonel de Luce’s grief make this the most somber of the Flavia mysteries; yet, it also includes the most delightful funeral tribute (cooked up by Daffy and Feely) I’ve read, and it begins to offer Flavia some closure in terms of her relationship with her mother. It also offers some sage advice from Dogger, advice I took to heart and felt was appropriate for many of us in what sometimes can feel like the end of days:
“What are we going to do, Dogger?”
“We shall wait upon tomorrow,” he said.
“But–what if tomorrow is worse than today?”
“Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.”
“And so forth?” I asked.
“And so forth,” Dogger said.
At the end of this novel, Flavia is going off to school, so the people of Bishop’s Lacey can rest easy in the assurance that their mortality rate is likely to go down. For Flavia, new adventures and new discoveries await.