About Marthe Jocelyn
Marthe Jocelyn is the award-winning author and illustrator of nearly fifty books for children of all ages. Her picture book Sam Sorts was honored by the United States Board on Books for Youth as an Outstanding International Book, and another picture book, Hannah’s Collections, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Illustration. Her novel Mable Riley won the inaugural TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. Marthe was also the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Vicky Metcalf Award for her body of work. Her latest books are the middle-grade mystery series, Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen, the third of which (The Dead Man in the Garden) was nominated for a 2022 Edgar Award. She lives in Stratford Ontario.
In writing the Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen series, I was imagining a version of the shy, curious girl who would grow up to become the person who changed the face of murder mysteries throughout the world. The person who ingeniously plotted the deaths of hundreds of victims… Agatha Christie.
The first book, The Body Under The Piano, presents twelve-year-old detectives, Aggie Morton and her Belgian friend, Hector Perot, living in Torquay, England, in 1902. This series-launcher is also an introduction (for middle grade readers) to a few now-established tropes of crime fiction – many of which were initially applied by Christie herself. The second book, Peril At Owl Park, pays homage to the setting of a country house during a snowstorm, with a body in the library on Christmas morning! Number three – The Dead Man In The Garden – takes place at a spa-hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire. This was my nod to Christie’s mysterious real life excursion in 1926 when she escaped her failing marriage. What if she’d been there as a girl and recalled it as a place of refuge?
And now, number four, The Seaside Corpse! Again, I wished to plant in my young Aggie the seeds for a future passion. In this case, excavating buried remnants of the past. If she were on site for the thrilling discovery of a prehistoric skeleton, wouldn’t that coincide with her later excitement about the clues of antiquity that can be dug out of the ground? Christie wrote six novels that feature a character who is an archaeologist, or use the backdrop of a dig. Her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan, was eminent in the field, and she spent many months of her life on various digs in the Middle East. Choosing palaeontology over archaeology was determined by the landscape where Agatha Christie – and Aggie Morton – lived as a child. One of the world’s richest and ever-changing treasure troves of fossilized bones is along the cliffs of Devon and Dorset, known as the Jurassic Coast. This is where twelve-year-old Mary Anning and her brother famously discovered one of the first known ichthyosaurs in 1811. What better place for Aggie and Hector to assist in retrieving another? Not to mention a human corpse as well…
Cover design by Lisa Jager, Cover art by Isabelle Follath
Title Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen: The Seaside Corpse
Authors Marthe Jocelyn
Target Audience Middle Grade
Publication Date November 1st 2022 by Tundra Books
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon ● Chapters ● The Book Depository ● Barnes & Noble ● IndieBound
For young detective Aggie Morton and her friend Hector, an opportunity to dig up fossils becomes even more thrilling when a corpse washes ashore in this fourth book in the Aggie Morton, Mystery Queen series, inspired by the life of Agatha Christie as a child and her most popular creation, Hercule Poirot.
After an invigorating but not exactly restful trip to a Yorkshire spa during which she survived a near brush with death and foiled a murderer, aspiring writer Aggie Morton and her friend Hector are thrilled to have the opportunity to stay at a camp by the sea and watch real paleontologists at work. The famed husband and wife team of the Blenningham-Crewes are about to become even more famous with the recovery of the fossilized bones of an ichthyosaur from the sea by Lyme Regis. This news has already caught the attention of an American millionaire, a British museum and a travelling circus owner, who each want the bones for their own collections. Tensions are running high throughout the camp, from the cook, to the collectors, to the Blenningham-Crewes themselves, and become downright dangerous after Aggie and Hector make a discovery of their own: a body on the beach. Not a fossil, but a human body.
(We join Aggie and her brother-in-law, James, part way through Chapter One. James is at the wheel of his new motorcar, taking Aggie to collect her friend Hector at the train station in Axminster, before they continue to their destination – a palaeontological dig on the coast of Dorset.)
“This motorcar is the prettiest thing in my life,” James said, at a half-holler. “Aside from your sister, of course.”
I leaned over to punch his arm.
“Hey! Not while I’m driving!”
I snatched back my hand back and held down the map fluttering on my lap. How foolish to tease the person at the helm of a machine roaring through the countryside faster than a cantering horse!
“You’ll be at Camp Crewe four nights before your grandmother arrives on Friday for her weekend at the hotel in town,” said James. “Are you nervous to be without family for so long?”
“Hector will be with me, so I shan’t be nervous,” I said. “Though I’ve never slept in a tent before. I expect that will be odd. I’m more curious than anything else.”
“No other Morton female has ever slept in a tent,” said James. “Not your sister, or mother, nor your Grannie Jane. That’s quite an achievement. Add to that being part of a rare fossil excavation, and you may claim uncommon scientific endeavor!”
“Especially now that they’ve uncovered something so grand to excavate,” I said. “The remains of a creature lying unseen for all of history.”
“Our timing is indeed fortuitous,” said James. “We had no idea, when the arrangements were made, that Mrs. Blenningham-Crewe would trip over a spectacular find. This sort of undertaking usually leans heavily on guessing and luck.”
“Guessing and luck is what makes fossil-hunting and palaeontology so like detecting,” I said.
James flashed me a smile. “Just your cup of tea, eh? But here’s a chance to apply that curiosity to a subject more savory than human corpses, do you see? At the governors’ meeting for the museum, when this notion of encouraging young scientists came along, I jumped at the chance to have you and Hector be part of it.”
“They didn’t mind that I’m a girl?” I said.
James concentrated very hard on the road for a minute, but it was a sham. Not so much as a field mouse in our path.
“Truth is,” he said, after a bit, “there are occasional advantages to being Lord Greyson and on the board of governors. I suggested that the Natural History Museum must embrace the twentieth century and allow girls to learn about science. You’re a bit of an experiment, do you see? Best foot forward, and all that.”
Well, humph. I could summon good behavior when necessary, and Hector was as polite as a vicar on Sunday.
“What you mean is that I mustn’t let you down,” I said.
“No chance of that,” said James, in his nice way. “I have utter faith that you’ll hold your own with the boys, Hector and the other two. The Young Scientists League, the governors are calling it. They’ve even come up with a — ”
“Slogan,” I interrupted. “You said already. I’ve got it memorized. ’Introducing inquiring youth to the facts and the mysteries of Mother Earth.’ Right?”
James nodded. “Professor Blenningham-Crewe and his wife have quite a reputation in the fossil world,” he said. “I expect that this, this, whatever its name is, will be their ticket to fossil royalty. Some sort of swimming lizard – icky-something – quite unpronounceable.”
“Ichthyosaur,” I said. James had read us the letter from his friend, Mr. Everett Tobie, who was part of the team at Camp Crewe.
“You see?” said James. “You’re a natural.”
“So, you fixed it for Hector and me to be part of the Young Scientists League, and you fixed it for your school chum to be the photographer, and—”
“No, no, I had nothing to do with that,” said James. “Everett is the one who informed me about the Blenningham-Crewes to start with. His contribution is drawing the specimens and taking photographs on digs. He’s a real artist.”
“How did he learn to do that?”
“He was always sketching, even at school. Cartoons of the masters, still lifes of the breakfast table, anything that caught his eye. He was born abroad, where his father was running a British outpost. His mother was Moroccan. Mr. Tobie met her out there and surprised himself by getting married. Sadly, she died early on, and his father brought Everett home to England.”
I decided I liked Everett for this reason alone. My own Papa had died one year and six months ago. Hello, Papa, I said to him most days. I thought of him for the smallest of reasons — when I put extra honey on my toast, or calculated a sum, or watched Mummy brushing her hair. What would he say about me riding in a motorcar? On my way to dig up fossils and to stay with strangers in a tent? So many things he would never know about my life!
“Will we get there in time?” I said. My nose and cheeks were tingling from sun and wind.
“Plenty of time.” James reached over to tap the map. “Just don’t steer me wrong.”
I’d not had many opportunities in my life to follow a map, but found it an appealing exercise. Quite simply, I became a bird. Suddenly the world expanded in every direction, further ever than a human girl named Aggie might see. The lines and dots on the page took on a meaning that outshone even words when looked at from the sky. I directed the driver admirably, my wings swooping this way and that, my fingertip tracing the miles.
The red brick railway depot at Axminster had a roof that sloped to a high peak, like a gingerbread house with drippy icing. James stopped the motorcar nearby, and we climbed down. My legs, and indeed all of me, wobbled a bit after the abundance of jouncing.
“Nice to stop shouting for a minute,” said James. “You look a bit pink, Aggie. Put your hat back on while we’re standing here. Your mother will give me a dreadful wigging if you start sprouting freckles.”
“How long before the train comes?” I said.
James pulled out his watch. “A quarter of an hour, I should think. Let’s see what Cook packed for our lunch, shall we? I’m mad with thirst.” He opened the hamper and pulled out bottles of lemonade and a packet of cucumber sandwiches laced with dill from the kitchen garden at Owl Park. I kept one wrapped for Hector, as he was always hungry.
“How many minutes now?” I asked, as we tidied things away.
“We should hear the whistle any moment,” said James. We strolled along the platform, nodding hello to a porter who waited in the shade.
“Oh, look!” A bright poster was pasted to the station wall, showing a dog with a ruffled collar and a ballerina on the back of a spotted pony. “There’s a circus in Lyme Regis this very week!”
We read the list of attractions printed in gold and scarlet letters.
Clowns & Tumblers!! Dancing Dogs!!
Bicycling Tricks!! Famous Fire Eater!!
Feats of Physical Fortitude by the World’s Strongest Man!!
Other Rare & Remarkable SightsI mustn’t get my hopes up. We had come to Lyme Regis for a more elevated purpose than visiting a circus. But wouldn’t it be thrilling?
We heard the blast of the whistle. Hector was nearly here!
Certain works of literature referred to a steam engine as an Iron Horse, but it seemed to me more a mythical creature. Hot gusts of steam were the fiery breaths of an angry dragon. The ground trembled a little as the train approached, like a minotaur knocking down trees. Thundering wheels screeched against metal tracks, like cries of angry harpies.
The beast shuddered to a stop. Carriage doors popped open along its length, releasing passengers from their compartments onto the platform. A slight fog of steam lingered as I looked madly back and forth for Hector.
There! James strode toward him, two paces ahead of me, but I darted past his elbow to make certain I was first.
“Hector!”
He wore a sailor suit, light blue for summer, his case held in one hand while keeping his straw boater in place with the other. Was it because he came from Belgium that he looked so small and foreign? None of the hurrying adults paid any attention. Only I knew the prodigious friction of his brain cells, and the capacity of his heart for true friendship.
My unladylike greeting knocked him off-balance, but he withstood my embrace with good cheer. James scooped up his case and hoisted it to his shoulder as if it were a loaf of bread.
“Did you bring your torch?” I said. “And your magnifying glass? I expect that will be especially useful, don’t you, for looking at old bones?”
“Yes, and yes,” said Hector. “Also, the vicar lends to me his binoculars. I am equipped to see both near and far.” We hurried to keep up with James.
“And now!” I said. “The motorcar! Wait till you feel it purring and chuckling all about you!”
Hector came to a halt, suitably impressed. “A Peugot Double Phaeton, monsieur?” he said. “Manufactured in this year of 1903?”
“You are correct.” James patted the motorcar as if he’d built it himself. Hector ran his fingers over the gleaming bonnet, polished with industry by James as he could not bear to relinquish the task to a servant.
“We’ll be a bit squished in back with the luggage,” I said, “but I want to sit together, don’t you? You won’t believe how fast we go!” It was to be Hector’s first time riding in a motorcar as well. “And let’s never go anywhere without each other again,” I said. “Never ever.”
“And may we agree…” James tucked Hector’s case under the lunch hamper, “that this particular excursion will not include the discovery of a dead body?”
“I’m afraid we cannot make that promise.” I grinned at Hector. “Can we?”
Foolishly, I was thinking of giant reptile bones.
