Detective Stanley and the Mystery at the Museum

RATING:
Detective Stanley and the Mystery at the Museum
Detective Stanley and the Mystery at the Museum review
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  • UK publisher / ISBN: Flying Eye - 978-1-83874-211-9
  • Release date: 2025
  • UPC: 9781838742119
  • Contains adult content?: no
  • Does this pass the Bechdel test?: no
  • Positive minority portrayal?: no
  • CATEGORIES: All-Ages, Humour, Mystery

Detective Stanley has retired after a distinguished career with the Narlybone police, and has the gold watch to prove it. He’s just settling down to his breakfast pancakes on his first day off the job when a letter is slipped through his door informing him of a robbery at the museum and that his help is desperately needed. How can he ignore another case?

Aiming at young readers with a mystery that educates. Hannah Tunnicliffe and Erica Harrison have pitched Detective Stanley almost perfectly. Like an Agatha Christie detective he’s bland and polite while nothing escapes his notice, and he’s placed in eye-catching environments with plenty for readers to study.

His adventure straddles the borderline between comics and children’s storybook, the first few pages exclusively busy pictures accompanied by captions, before the dialogue kicks in when more people are around. It’s a relatively simple presentation, but Tunnicliffe doesn’t talk down to readers by using simple vocabulary. There are terms used requiring children to ask or to consider the meaning, and that’s a good thing.

While they’re doing that, they can lose themselves in the spreads Harrison draws, where there’s always something going on. We first see Stanley through the window of his home alongside several others in the street, and equally busy spreads feature the museum and its exhibits and the jail, where we glimpse inside a number of cells through the windows and cutaways. These pages are great, with all kinds of activity taking place, some of it very funny. Having all the characters as human animals is another form of engagement.

The mystery is good, and the solution well foreshadowed and presented, the latter also a la Christie with everyone gathered in the one room for the revelation. This is a delight. More please.

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