As her bestselling Murder Most Unladylike series ends, the children’s author talks about cosy crime, gay characters and watching her schoolgirl detectives grow up
Warning: when tween readers get their hands on the final book in the Murder Most Unladylike series, published next week, they may well burst into tears on the very first page. Fans have been devouring the adventures of 1930s schoolgirl detectives Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong since 2014, but have been tipped off that in the ninth book, Death Sets Sail – a romp through Egypt inspired by Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile – only one of the girls makes it home alive. “I’m getting 20 emails a week reasoning with me, saying ‘Please don’t kill one of them! Please!’” laughs Robin Stevens over the phone from Oxford.
For this last book, though, she “wanted to go big. I have kids who started reading when they were 10, they’re now 16, so for the final one I wanted something that you’re desperate to know about – something exciting and terrifying.” Daisy and Hazel were 13 when we first met them at Deepdean boarding school, setting up their own detective society and discovering a dead body in the gymnasium. Aristocratic, golden-haired Daisy declares herself Holmes to Hazel’s Watson; at first, Daisy calls the shots and Hazel, whose family lives in Hong Kong, writes up the cases. As she says, “I am much too short to be the heroine of this story, and who ever heard of a Chinese Sherlock Holmes?”
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