Q&A: Alan Bradley, author of Flavia de Luce series

On a cold January night, there may be nothing more delightful than curling up under that oversized carmel ombre faux-fur throw your wonderful sister bought you as a holiday gift, and diving into a good mystery. This is where I’ll be, at least, turning the pages of the latest installment in Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce mysteries — The Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust.

I distinctly remember when I first heard about the debut book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which was published in 2009. A colleague was raving out how much she liked it and mentioned that it was a Young Adult book, and that the main character was an 11-year-old British girl in 1950.

I know what you’re thinking because I thought it, too: A YA book? I don’t think so.

Ah, foolish me. There I was committing the same mistake J.K. Rowling’s literary agent purportedly did back in 1995 when she said, after reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, something to the effect of “You’ll never get rich writing these children’s books.” And I should have known better because by 2009, I had already read my way through the seven Harry Potter novels.

Last summer, the publishing world was a-chatter with talk about YA books and the adults who read them. And there are many, many of those adults.

Back in 2012, Publishers Weekly announced the results of a marketing research study that showed that 55 percent of YA readers were older than 18; a full 28 percent of all YA sales were between the ages of 30 and 44 and the vast majority of those said, nope, they were not buying the books for their kids, they were reading the books for themselves.

Last June, in an article in Slate, the backlash against these grown-up YA fans began with a scathing article by Ruth Graham, who stated: “Adults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children.”

By September, noted New York Times film critic A.O. Scott took a deeper and broader look at American culture, declaring the end of adulthood, with the rise of YA fiction popularity being just one small sign of a complete decline.

Personally, I think anybody who consumes a steady diet of anything is just boring, and anyone who refuses to try something wonderful because it’s classified for one particular demographic rather than another is simply silly. And when silly me finally did sit down to read Bradley’s first Flavia novel, I fell in love.

Flavia, the brilliant, motherless, chemistry-obsessed, poison-loving kid at the heart of these books has become one of my favorite literary characters.

She lives in a dilapidated old mansion in the English countryside with two older sisters who are mostly horrid to her and a father who’s a bit distant and vague. In each book, she solves a murder, but she also comes a bit closer to understanding the larger mystery in her life: who her mother, Harriet, really was.

Bradley’s first Flavia book was published when he was 70, and it was the first novel he ever wrote. From his home somewhere in the Irish Sea, on the Isle of Man, he answered my questions about Flavia’s origins, the course of his career, the YA brouhaha and what’s next for him.

How did the character of Flavia come about?

Well, it was frustrating for a while. I was trying to write my first novel — what I think of now as my ‘Alan Bradley’ novel —and this unknown little girl had popped out of the inkpot and hijacked the entire enterprise. It took me a long time to realize that she knew perfectly well what she was doing, and that all I really needed to do was to stop resisting her and start listening.

The Flavia series are mysteries — each can stand alone —but the overall arc is a bigger mystery: Flavia is gradually learning about her deceased mom, Harriet, as she grows up and the stories progress. Did this series come to you fully formed? What has the process been like?

I knew from the first chapters of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (the first book in the series) what the overall story arc must be. This created a problem when I realized I was writing not one book, but six! How to break the news to my publishers? In retrospect, I realize how lucky I was in having publishers who were willing to let Flavia grow and take her course.

There’s been a lot of chat in the media in the last year about the idea of Young Adult novels and the adults who read them. What are your thoughts on this?

The very idea of having categories — or genres, for that matter — gives me the cold shudders. I write for people who enjoy the kind of books I write, who range in age from about 8 to 95, and who share my enthusiasms. A good book is a good book, and any book that causes a reader to pick up another, has done its job.

Can you tell us a bit more about the TV series that will be based on the books?

The TV series is still in the formative stages. It is being produced by Sam Mendes’ (of American Beauty and Skyfall fame) Neal Street Productions. I understand that each episode will cover one of the Flavia books. The TV scripts are being written by Harriet Warner, who has written several episodes of Call the Midwife, one of the most successful series in BBC history. It’s incredibly exciting to be part of all this; so very different from tinkering in a sweltering studio with the guts of a reluctant television camera!

Does everything you know about Flavia actually make it into a book, or are there more secrets she has that only you know?

Flavia is always taking me by surprise. I quite often don’t know what she’s going to do until she does it, and I’m constantly aware that she does things that would never, ever, have occurred to me. I have also begun to suspect that she keeps things from me: things that are too much, perhaps, for my delicate ears.