From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler

"I’ll do it chronologically, in the order that I discovered them. The first detective I’d like to choose is Claudia, from The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler by E L Konigsburg. This is an American book that I read as a young child, and it’s a classic in America. It’s a phenomenal book, and one of the cleverest mystery stories I’ve ever read. It’s about a girl called Claudia who is dissatisfied with her home life. She has a lot of brothers and wants to do something dramatic, so she decides she wants to run away. She’s a very organised and practical child, she doesn’t like to be uncomfortable, to be dirty or cold, so she decides she wants to run away to somewhere really nice. And she decides that that perfect place would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. “It’s a phenomenal book, and one of the cleverest mystery stories I’ve ever read” She picks one of her brothers—the one that she thinks is going to be the best co-conspirator—and they run away together to the Met. And they live there, in the museum, for a couple of weeks, which is just brilliant. As a kid, it was such a wish-fulfilment book. I imagined myself living a weird, adventurous life in splendour, just like Claudia and Jamie! But while they’re there, the children discover an art history mystery. There is a statue in the museum that might or might not have been carved by a really famous artist, and they became obsessed with trying to work out the truth. Their quest leads them to Mrs Frankweiler, and some very surprising things happen—I won’t say any more. I like because her because she’s so practical. Often in books, you have characters who are very imaginative and very brave. But you don’t often have someone who’s just incredibly logical. Claudia really thinks through things. She needs to make sure she has enough money; she needs to make sure she has enough food. And Claudia’s also somebody who’s a bit spikier, a bit more prickly than many girls you see in literature. She really gets cross, and she’s a bit unpleasant sometimes. I like that she’s not biddable and polite. She really knows her mind, she knows what she wants, and she goes and does it. As a kid I couldn’t walk by fountains without thinking about it. I loved the book because it’s a mystery story, and because it’s so beautifully written, but also because it is set in a museum, and I sort of grew up in a museum. My mother worked at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and so I was a child running around the galleries, thinking about how wonderful it would be if the museum really belonged to me, and if I could live in it."