Alan Bradley

Alan Bradley is a Canadian author best known for the Flavia de Luce series, a run of cozy mysteries set in 1950s England and narrated by an eleven-year-old chemistry prodigy with a taste for poisons and a habit of solving murders faster than the local police. Beginning with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie in 2009, the series won the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award before it was even fully written, and went on to become an international bestseller praised for Flavia's distinctive, precocious narrative voice.

Bradley worked for decades in television engineering, including a long career at the University of Saskatchewan, before turning to fiction relatively late in life -- his debut novel was published when he was in his seventies, after decades of writing short stories and radio scripts on the side. The Flavia de Luce books, set at the fading English country estate of Buckshaw, draw on classic English village mystery conventions filtered through a wholly original child narrator.

A new reader should start with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which introduces Flavia, her family, and the chemistry-lab-in-a-Victorian-greenhouse setting that recurs throughout. There is no film or TV adaptation to date; the series' following has grown through devoted word of mouth and Flavia's singular narrative voice.