Alan Bradley Books in Order

If you want to start with Flavia’s first case: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie → The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag → A Red Herring Without Mustard.
If you enjoy snowed in country house mysteries: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows → Speaking from Among the Bones → The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches.
If you want Flavia’s later adventures and character growth: As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust → Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd → The Grave's a Fine and Private Place → The Golden Tresses of the Dead → What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust.
If you prefer reflective, real life stories: The Shoebox Bible.
If you're a devoted Sherlock Holmes reader: Ms Holmes of Baker Street.

Alan Bradley is a Canadian mystery writer best known for creating Flavia de Luce, an eleven-year-old chemist and sleuth in 1950s England. He was born in Toronto in 1938 and grew up in the lakeside town of Cobourg, Ontario.

His childhood was not easy. His father left when he was very young, and his mother raised him and his two older sisters on her own. Sickly and often home from school, he read everything he could find and spent long hours wandering the local cemetery with a book in hand.

Bradley gravitated toward radios and circuits, and studied radio and television engineering. He worked for stations in Ontario before joining a technical team at a college in Toronto, then moved west to the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. There he helped design a television studio and spent about twenty five years as Director of Television Engineering.

Even while he was working with cameras and transmitters, writing was a steady thread. He taught scriptwriting and television production, published short fiction in journals, and wrote children’s stories that won regional awards. He also contributed lifestyle and arts columns to Canadian newspapers and helped found writers' groups that encouraged new voices.

In 1994 he took early retirement so he could write full time. For several years he focused on screenplays. When wildfires swept through the Okanagan in 2003 and spared his own home while destroying many nearby, it pushed him to rethink what he wanted to put on the page. The result was a shift to nonfiction.

First came Ms Holmes of Baker Street, written with fellow Sherlockian William A. S. Sarjeant, which playfully argues that Sherlock Holmes was in fact a woman living as a man in Victorian London. Then Bradley turned to his own past in The Shoebox Bible, a memoir built around the box of scrap paper on which his mother had copied Bible verses while raising three children alone.

Flavia de Luce arrived soon after. Encouraged by his wife to enter a crime writing competition, Bradley wrote fifteen pages about a sharp young girl with a bicycle and a passion for poisons. Those pages won the prize, triggered a bidding war among publishers, and became the opening of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

The novel introduced readers to Buckshaw, a crumbling country house, and to Flavia’s habit of tripping over corpses in the lanes and libraries of Bishop's Lacey. Follow up books such as The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, and The Golden Tresses of the Dead deepen her world with family secrets, chemistry experiments, and a dry, funny voice. The series has picked up a shelf of mystery awards along the way.

In later volumes Bradley sends Flavia to a Canadian boarding school, brings her home to grief and change, and lets her grow into a working detective in stories like As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, and What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust. Through it all he keeps the focus on character, small sensory details, and the way curiosity bumps up against the adult world.

After years in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, Bradley and his wife sold their house and began spending long stretches of time abroad, often on islands far from the Canadian prairies. He continues to write about Flavia and about the odd corners of his own life, showing that a major writing career can begin long after most people have settled into retirement.