The Weed That Stringsthe Hangman’s BagBy Alan BradleyDoubleday Canada272 pp.; $29.95Reviewed by Nicholas Pashley

Many aspiring writers plan, in their retirement years, to write a novel. Few of these projects are ever completed, let alone published. Oldsters, take heart. Heed the example of Saskatchewan (via Ontario) writer Alan Bradley, who at the age of 69 sent 15 pages of an otherwise unwritten mystery novel to the British Crimewriter’s Association and promptly won the Debut Dagger Award.

Those same pages also won Bradley a three-book publishing contract, the first book of which, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, became an international best-seller. Bradley and his wife now live in Malta, where Saskatchewan winters are a distant memory. It’s a story that reads like, well, fiction.

Bradley’s formula is simple: possess a rich imagination, write well and wittily and invent a good central character. In one of his earlier, pre-fiction endeavours, he co-wrote a book positing that Sherlock Holmes was actually a woman, which put the cat among the Holmesian pigeons. As if to prove his point that a female sleuth is a sound proposition, Bradley gives us Flavia de Luce.

Flavia is an 11-year-old girl who lives with her distant father and two mean older sisters in a rundown stately home somewhere not far from Haworth, up Yorkshire way. There have been de Luces living at Buckshaw since William the Conqueror, but most of them lived among more splendour than the current Luces. It is 1950, and England is a country still emerging from war.

Bradley’s readers are frequently amazed to learn that he had never seen England until 2007 (when he went to pick up his prize), so thoroughly English is his work. His parents fed him a regular diet of English books and magazines in childhood, and it is to this childhood that Bradley returns. His Flavia is a bright girl who passes much of her time in an ancestor’s Victorian laboratory. Her particular interest is poison, and she devotes much energy to plotting nasty outcomes for her sisters, Ophelia and Daphne. The greater Buckshaw area is not an obvious place for murder (though English village life has a long fictional history of gruesome discoveries), but when people begin to wind up dead, Flavia takes a keen interest.

Bradley has said he does not want Flavia to grow older. Quite right: She is perfect as she is. She is at an age when she is invisible. People don’t notice her much, and they certainly don’t listen to her. This allows her to get to places the police can’t. In her first book, Flavia found a dying man in the Buckshaw cucumber patch. In The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, Flavia meets a pair of bohemian puppeteers, Rupert and Nialla, touring the country in a clapped-out Austin van. Rupert, it turns out, is famous as a television personality, though Flavia is unfamiliar with him: “Father says it’s a filthy invention.” (This reviewer was in England back then and had definitely never seen a television in 1950; I assume television personalities were thin on the ground.)

Both of Bradley’s Flavia books include an earlier death that still defies explanation. This second book is haunted by the hanging death of a five-year-old boy; is it possible the lad hanged himself? And is the visit of Rupert and Nialla to nearby Bishop’s Lacey just by chance? And will someone turn up dead by the end of the 12th chapter?

It will fall to Inspector Hewitt to investigate this last question, unless Flavia can get to the solution first. I suspect that as this series develops — Bradley has plotted out six Flavia books — Inspector Hewitt will grow weary of being outguessed by the young sleuth. Bradley’s readers, on the other hand, will not. Flavia is a precocious delight, never quite stretching our credulity to the breaking point. She knows a lot about chemistry but less about adult relationships and (heaven forbid) sex. There at least Insp. Hewitt has the upper hand.

There is debate over whether Alan Bradley is a writer of young adult literature, whatever that is. (When I was a young adult, there were no young adult novels; we put down our Enid Blyton one day and picked up grown-up books, possibly in search of more explicit material.) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was conceived as YA, and many think similarly of The Life of Pi, so my advice to adults is not to worry too much about it. This witty, thoughtful new book has an old-fashioned cosy feel to it. Flavia is a peach.

• Nicholas Pashley is the author of Cheers!: An Intemperate History of Beer in Canada.