Aggie Morton is a twelve-year-old girl living in Torquay, England in the early 1900s. Aggie is painfully shy, but she loves writing and has a fascination for the macabre. She loves reading Sherlock Holmes stories, and she likes to write poetry and imagine her own macabre stories. With her friend, a Belgian boy named Hector Perot, she investigates murders that happen to come their way.
Aggie is loosely based on real life mystery author, Agatha Christie, who also grew up in Torquay during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The circumstances of Aggie’s family are similar to that of the real-life Agatha Christie. Hector is based on Agatha Christie’s detective character, Hercule Poirot. Hector is a refugee from Belgium who arrived without his parents and is staying with the local vicar in Torquay. In real life, Agatha Christie based Hercule Poirot on Belgian refugees who came to England during the First World War, in the 1910s. The reasons why Hector is a refugee aren’t entirely defined in the book series because it is set pre-WWI, but if the series was set in WWI, either Aggie would have to be either younger than the real-life Agatha Christie was at the same time or would have to be a young adult instead of a child.
The entire series is peppered with references to Agatha Christie’s books and stories and her characters. Aggie’s Granny Jane resembles Agatha Christie’s character Jane Marple, an elderly spinster who is also an amateur detective. Like Miss Marple, Granny Jane also has a fascination for mystery and finds insights by comparing suspects to people she has known before. Real life Agatha Christie based the character of Miss Marple on the women in her family. Like Hercule Poirot, Hector has elegant manners and is neat and meticulous.
The plots of the books draw on elements from Agatha Christie’s books although none of them entirely follows Agatha Christie’s works. Aggie has a somewhat “morbid” imagination (her mother’s description), and some of what she imagines includes elements and plot descriptions for real life Agatha Christie stories. Sometimes, titles for Agatha Christie stories appear as throw-away lines, like a reference to a “cat among the pigeons” or someone taking a 4:50 train to Paddington. Even adult Agatha Christie fans can enjoy this series, picking out all of the Agatha Christie references.
The series is by Marthe Jocelyn.
Books in the Series
The Body Under the Piano (2020)
A disagreeable local woman is murdered and discovered by young Aggie under a piano when she and other girls show up for their usual dance lessons.
Peril at Owl Park (2020)
Aggie and her friend Hector go to spend Christmas with Aggie’s married sister at the manor house where she now lives with her husband. One of their other guests is carrying a cursed emerald, which is stolen, and the children discover one of the actors hired for the Christmas party’s entertainment dead in the library.
The Dead Man in the Garden (2021)
The Seaside Corpse (2022)
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