Kansas City area author wins ‘Oscar of mystery writing’ for her plucky young sleuth

Myrtle Hardcastle is investigating a murder.

It’s a muggy August day in 1893 London, and she arrives at a building where the law office she will visit is: “a full five stories up, past a chemist, a stationer’s, a secretarial agency, and an insurance brokerage.”

And though Myrtle bemoans the hot climb, author Elizabeth Bunce has done her a favor.

“Originally it was seven flights of stairs, but we couldn’t find any evidence of office buildings that were quite that tall, so I had to knock off a couple of stories from the original architecture,” Bunce explains from her office in Lenexa.

It’s that kind of attention to historical detail that’s created a new world so engaging that she’s just won this year’s Edgar Award for best juvenile mystery for “Premeditated Myrtle,” the first book in her new series about the titular 12-year-old detective.

She calls the award the “Oscar of mystery writing.”

The Mystery Writers of America has presented the Edgar Awards — named for Edgar Allan Poe — for 75 years, and they’re now in 15 categories.

“It is one award that almost any reader has heard of, so that’s very exciting. I’ve gotten cards and gifts and congratulations from people I haven’t heard from in 40 years, which is incredible,” Bunce says.

The book about the young sleuth is a quick read, and each sentence — whether Myrtle is interrogating a murder suspect or silently considering her next move — is loaded with energy that propels the reader forward in the tradition of all the most addictive of children’s books mysteries.

The Myrtle Hardcastle series is a break from Bunce’s previous work in that it is written for middle-grade readers rather than young adults.

Not long ago, Bunce realized that the fantasy novels she was writing for teen readers were getting darker, more violent and sexier, yet she continued to receive fan mail from fifth- and sixth-graders.

“They loved the thick language and the historical settings and the rich themes and the little hint of darkness there in the story lines and the spookiness and the drama,” Bunce says. “So I thought, I need to write a book that’s very me, but especially for those younger kids.”

She landed on developing a plucky preteen character whose sidekick is an outgoing cat named Peony with a meow that sounds like “no.” Peony says no a lot. Maybe it’s no coincidence that a forthright cat makes repeated appearances in the online video of Bunce’s Edgar Award acceptance speech.

In that speech, she gives a shoutout to all the kids like Myrtle — and a young Elizabeth Bunce: “‘Premeditated Myrtle’ is my love letter to a nerdy outspoken middle-schooler whose home room teacher called argumentative and antisocial,” Bunce says. “Thirty some years later, I am amazed and thrilled by the incredibly warm reception that ‘Myrtle’ has received from fans throughout the world. And I want to say a huge thanks to the Mystery Writers of America for welcoming us with open arms and ensuring that all of the precocious, irrepressible and maybe a little bit morbid girls and boys will always have a place to call home.”

Becoming a writer

Bunce can’t say exactly when Myrtle Hardcastle came to life. She knows that she wanted to write about a girl interested in solving crimes, but the settings she’d use in other books, namely the Renaissance and the 18th century, didn’t seem right for this girl detective.

What Bunce knew, though, was that the 1890s was possibly the most fascinating period in history for the development of criminology. She says that everything we know today — the science of fingerprinting, toxicology, crime scene analysis, even the discovery of DNA — happened in the late 1800s.

“I loved the idea of a character who was a leading-edge early adopter of everything modern, and the idea of what does ultra-modern look like and feel like in 1893,” Bunce says.

One of the most surprising elements of the series is its fresh vibe — a book that certainly feels contemporary — in contrast with the setting. Bunce says she achieved that through a lot of research and her double major in English literature and anthropology.

Bunce grew up in Iowa sure she wanted to study marine biology. Halfway through high school, however, she realized writing stories was also a job.

“Obviously, I knew that the books didn’t just appear out of the ether, somebody wrote them,” she says, “but it didn’t click for me that just an ordinary imaginative person who had too many imaginary friends was doing this for a living.”

Already writing historical fiction and setting her early work in fantasy worlds, she intended to complement her English degree with the study of history. When the history class she planned to enroll in at the University of Iowa was full, a friend suggested an anthropology course.

Almost right away, she was riveted. It occurred to her that her interest in the past wasn’t about events, wars and politics, but about the lives of everyday people.

“So how people lived, what they ate, what they wore, what the social structures were, what the world building and the cosmology of people in the past was like,” Bunce explains. “I didn’t have a name for what it was I was interested in until I fell into my first anthropology class.”

Her academic background spurs her on to make sure every detail of her characters’ lives is true to 1893 England. She checks the etymology of words, reads about how ceiling fans and gas lights worked, and lucky for Myrtle, makes sure she knows how many flights of stairs buildings really had back then.

Making Myrtle modern

Concrete details weren’t so tough to get right. However, her characters and their relationships would need to resonate with modern audiences.

That shows up in several ways: in Myrtle’s relationship with her father after her mother dies; in her hopes for a career; and in her Black governess.

Myrtle’s father is single, which Bunce explains was common before the advent of penicillin and more contemporary medical practices. She says roughly half of children were either orphans or only had one parent.

“Death was close at hand, so I’m leaning into that tradition,” Bunce says.

She says the death of one or more parents is a tradition in children’s literature (think the majority of Disney movies) because of the very real losses people suffered, but also because young characters with two parents are less likely to go on major adventures.

Bunce says with parents around, “you don’t have the opportunity, you don’t have that moment where you are unsupervised enough, independent enough, to walk through the wardrobe into Narnia.”

What feels like an anachronism is Myrtle’s relationship with her father. She does have a governess who cares for her most of the time, but her father wants to be involved in her care and spends time speaking to her thoughtfully and affectionately. He’s a ’90s kind of guy — 1890s.

And girls weren’t necessarily encouraged to choose from a variety of career options and educational opportunities in Victorian England.

Myrtle’s mother dies before the action of the book but remains a strong female influence because she’s left paperwork and a loving husband behind. The governess, Ada Judson, an immigrant of mixed race by way of French Guiana and Scotland, is smart, calm and driven and a great co-conspirator in her charge’s investigatory pursuits.

“These are very real people that would have been part of the Victorian British landscape, we just don’t see them very often because they’ve been historically very, very underrepresented,” Bunce says. “And there’s no good reason to leave them out of a story you’re writing today.”

She says that she respects the move toward “own voices,” meaning that writers of color are the most appropriate people to write characters of color.

“But that doesn’t mean that as a white writer, all of my characters are going to be white because that’s not authentic, that’s not natural, that’s not the world I grew up in,” she says.

She must have hit the notes just right, because in addition to the Edgar Award, “Premeditated Myrtle” was also nominated for an Anthony Award, a mystery writers award to be presented this summer, and named an Honored Book by the Society of Midland Authors and a Kansas Notable Book. The Kansas Center for the Book has selected it to represent Kansas at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival this year.

“That was also a huge, huge thrill. Myrtle and I have had a busy couple of weeks here,” she says.

The series’ second book, “How to Get Away With Myrtle” was released last October, the same day as book one. The third book in the series, “Cold-Blooded Myrtle” is set for this October.