Hello Detectives! I hope your summers are going well, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.
I’ve been pretty quiet because there’s a lot going on behind the scenes – I sent The Most Unladylike Puzzle Book off to print at the end of last month (it’s coming out in September! Pre-order it now! It’s great!), and now I’m hard at work on Ministry of Unladylike Activity 3. This won’t be publishing until September 2025, but I want to get the first draft handed in before my autumn tour begins at the end of September (more news on that soon – we’ve finalised all of the tour stops, and we’re going to be announcing the whole tour in a few weeks).
So I’m head down on writing – I’m aiming to write 2,000 words a day each writing day to hit my deadline. Which is a lot! So that’s why you’re seeing a bit less of me at the moment. You can follow along on Instagram, though – and I’ll keep you updated here as well.
If you haven’t signed up to the Robin Stevens reading challenge yet, you still can – you need to be in the UK to be entered in the prize draw, but no matter where in the world you are, you can still have fun reading my books!
I do have one bit of nice news about my books – both Murder Most Unladylike and the Super Sunny Murder Club got mentioned in Nicolette Jones’s excellent round-up of new children’s crime fiction in the Sunday Times. It’s paywalled, but here’s the important extract:
This year marks ten years of Robin Stevens’s bestselling Murder Most Unladylike books: ten novels plus half a dozen spin-offs since a science mistress was first found dead in the gym. The series features the heroines Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong, who solve a surprising number of murders at their boarding school (Deepdean School for Girls, based on Stevens’s own experience of Cheltenham Ladies’ College) as well as
during the school holidays.
Stevens set her stories in that murderous Golden Age, the 1930s, with a fine sense of the period despite a more modern outlook on subjects such as sexual identity. Her decade of crime for kids has been responsible for a rash of copycat killings throughout the children’s books industry, and younger readers have found a thirst for homicide.
Out this summer is an anthology of stories, The Super Sunny Murder Club (HarperCollins £8.99, 8-12), co-edited by Stevens with Serena Patel, the author of the amiable Anisha: Accidental Detective series. It demonstrates the range of writers who have taken up the genre, with 13 diverse authors — from Abiola Bello to Dominique Valente — reunited after a Christmassy anthology, The Very Merry Murder Club, which was published in 2021. Not every story involves a murder but this is a compelling gateway to crime fiction. It is a good introduction to such talents as Sharna Jackson (High-Rise Mystery), Patrice Lawrence (The Elemental Detectives) and Roopa Farooki (The Cure for a Crime).
I’m so proud of this mention – what a decade it’s been for children’s crime!
