A Spy in the House and The Body at the Tower are the first two installments in a planned trilogy of period mysteries aimed primarily at young adult readers. Y. S. Lee, or Ying, as she refers to herself on her official website was born in Singapore and grew up in Vancouver and Toronto. Her doctoral studies in Victorian literature and culture yielded a scholarly monograph, Masculinity and the English Working Class, and inspired her to develop a story line about a detective agency run and staffed by women. And so the Agency came to be.
The action takes place in London during the 1850s. In a brief prologue to the first novel, Lee introduces her main character, Mary Lane, a twelve year-old orphan who receives the rather harsh sentence of hanging for the crime of housebreaking. On her way back to her jail cell from the courtroom where her sentence was rendered, a woman posing as a prison attendant abducts Mary after knocking her unconscious with a good whiff of chloroform. When she comes back to consciousness, Mary is in a clean, soft bed. She discovers that she has been recruited to Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy for Girls, run by Anne Treleaven and Felicity Frame.
Five years later (a period not covered in these two novels), Mary—now with the last name Quinn—comes before the very same ladies at the completion of her studies. They offer her the chance to try her hand at being an undercover detective. It seems that Miss Scrimshaw’s provides a training ground for these operatives. This being a young adult series, Lee doesn’t provide a whole lot of background on the school or the Agency. I construe that whoever is funding the Agency has a belief that young women from troubled backgrounds deserve a chance. Certainly the founders believe that these young women have skills that make them ideal detectives—rather like the Baker Street Irregulars who worked for Sherlock Holmes on occasion.
Mary is the heroine of the series. In fact, Mary, Treleaven and Frame, and one other character (more on this one in the next paragraph) are the only continuing characters across the two novels. Mary is intelligent and enterprising and spunky. She has a past that occasionally catches up with her. In A Spy in the House, she learns something about her father’s fate that she hadn’t known before. In The Body at the Tower, where she takes on the persona of a young man working at a construction site, she experiences flashbacks to her former life on the street.
The fourth continuing character, who gets a lot more to say and do than the two principles of the Agency, is a young engineer named James Easton. Although he and Mary experience some rough spots with each other (I think they are too much alike), they become friends and collaborators over the course of the two novels. There is even the spark of romance between them–although since this is a young adult series, that plot line is kept carefully discreet. And at least in these first two installments, Mary doesn’t reveal to James her true identity, either as an employee of the Agency or as the daughter of her father. No, I am not going to give that away either. It’s a secret worth discovering for yourself.
A Spy in the House tells of Mary’s first assignment, as a companion to the spoiled but musically-gifted daughter of a wealthy sea merchant connected with the East India Company. Her mission is to determine whether and how several of his trading ships have gone missing along with their valuable cargo. Among the missing items are a number of artifacts allegedly stolen from Hindu temples during the Sepoy Mutiny. Yes, A Spy in the House takes place in 1858, a year after that famous rebellion. In addition to this historical reference, Lee also builds the novel’s action around the heat wave and resulting Great Stink—the merchant’s house is right next to the Thames, so the pungent aroma permeates everything. Mary meets young Easton because his older brother George is a serious contender for the hand of the merchant’s daughter.
The Body at the Tower takes place roughly a year later, in the summer of 1859. Over Treleaven’s rather strenuous objections, Frame takes on an assignment that actually needs a young male agent, betting that Mary can do the job just as well. So Mary gets a haircut and dons boy’s clothing to become an apprentice laborer on the construction site of the clock tower for the Houses of Parliament. Yes, I mean the tower of Big Ben—did you realize it was of such recent vintage? I didn’t. The construction is long overdue for completion, materials seem to be missing from the site, and one of the bricklayers has fallen to his death from the clock tower. Young Mr. Easton, recently returned from an assignment in India during which he contracted a severe case of malaria, is hired by the site supervisor to conduct an official investigation of the situation to submit to the first commissioner of works.
Although they each run a little over 300 pages long, I found these novels to be quick and entertaining reads. The dialogue is crisp and interesting, the history is accurate and present but not overwhelming, the characters are sympathetic, the premise is sufficiently unique, and out of respect for the intended young readership, the language is generally polite, the sex and violence relatively low key. I can easily imagine the Walt Disney Company buying the film rights to the series.
According to Lee’s website, the third and final installment in the series, The Traitor and the Tunnel, is in production and scheduled for publication in the UK in August 2011, in the US and Canada in spring 2012. I look forward to seeing it! To be honest, I am not sure why she decided to make this into a trilogy. I don’t see any of the kind of plot development in the first two that would suggest some larger narrative ready to be wrapped up in just one more novel. Surely Mary worked on other cases in the year between the two already written, and will still be young enough to be of interest to young readers for a few more years. Why not just make it a series? I could see five or six novels emerging from this set of premises.
(Candlewick Press, 2009)
(Candlewick Press, 2010)
it’s fantastic!!!! i love it!!