It is very rare for me to find a book that becomes one of my future ‘comfort’ reads, but this one definitely fits the bill.  Not least because the author loves my favourite authors, especially Dorothy L Sayers, but also because he comes from Bristol, where I worked in libraries for 20 years.

This is the story of the incredible character that is Monty the Fox.  He is an avid fan of crime fiction, but he has something of a butterfly mind; flitting from one interest to another, but never sticking with anything.  In this he reminds me of Toad (Wind in the Willows) and like that character, he is totally frustrating for his friend Nettle (a rabbit), who is always the one to pick up the pieces.  However, this is such an intriguing  mystery that our hero does not have time to get bored with the investigation; perhaps he has finally found an occupation that is challenging and original enough to keep his brilliant brain fully occupied?

I am delighted that Charlie Nutbrown has written this wonderful article about how he gained his love of classic crime novels and how Sherlock Holmes has inspired this wonderful new sleuth.

MONTY THE FOX – THE NEW SHERLOCK HOMES?

One summer’s day, when I was eleven of so, my dad threw me a copy of a  book: The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes. For the next few days I sat in the garden, moving only to eat and sleep, and read my way through those 56 short stories and 4 novels – diving headlong into the world of
opium dens and gentlemen’s clubs, meerschaum pipes and London smog. Who could resist these blackmailers, murderers, and monstrous hounds? It was wonderfully seductive – both comforting and grotesque, familiar and exotic. What’s more, in Sherlock Holmes I found a hero I could believe in: brilliant, eccentric, and (crucially) entirely lacking in social skills.
So it was inevitable that when I came to write my children’s novel, The Feathered Book, it would feature a detective. My sleuth, Monty the Fox, is very deliberately not Holmes. Far from being cold and rational, he is over-excitable, childish and rather silly – a great fluffy ball of chaos and enthusiasm. Setting out to solve the theft of a cursed book from a locked room in a labyrinthine library, he blunders into all manner of messes: he gets ambushed, kidnapped by pirates, attacked by knife-wielding rats, and stuck in booby traps. Worst of all for a detective, he gets thoroughly bamboozled. Often, it is only the courage and good sense of his best friend, Nettle the Rabbit, that frees him from these mishaps.
Nevertheless, there is undeniably a large dash of Holmes in the book. Monty wears a dressing gown; he’s clever but unconventional; he flits between laziness and over-exertion. The book even begins and ends, in the manner of so many of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, with the detective and his friend in armchairs either side of a blazing fire. What’s more, Monty is inspired by a detective named Professor Meerschaum, the hero of a series of books the fox loves to read. A cold, austere polar bear, she owes more than a small debt to Holmes.
So, without my dad handing me that book on that distant summer’s day, it’s likely I would never have written The Feathered Book. I might not have been a writer at all. Since that holiday, I have re-read that book many times – so many times, in fact, that that old copy now lies in tatters, split in half on page 779, part way through The Valley of Fear. But no matter; I bought an identical copy. And, of course, I went on to read the other classics of detective fiction: Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and John Dickson Carr. But deep down my heart remains, as it always will, with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in those messy, smoke-filled rooms in Baker Street.