Behind the scenes of Mystery Mayhem!

Mystery Mayhem is a workshop that I wrote in 2019 following a request by a student called Elizabeth. She introduced me to a number of fantastic mystery stories written for children over recent years – books like The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd, and a fantastic series written by Robin Stevens which includes Death in the Spotlight and Mistletoe and Murder. Of course there is the Scarlet and Ivy series by Sophie Cleverly and Kensy and Max written by Jaqueline Harvey, too. 

I wrote our Mystery Mayhem workshop whilst lying on a banana lounge in Vietnam in 2019. This was harder than it sounds. I researched the writing process of Agatha Christie who wrote 66 detective novels. From this I developed the ‘Agatha Christie trail’ to help guide our Inkling writers as they craft their own mystery stories. The trail involves a number of super-fun stations designed to develop mystery story elements – including Daring Detectives, Suspicious Settings, Marvellous Mysteries and Clever Clues. Older writers have the chance to challenge themselves by developing motives, alibis and red herrings. (I told you it was tricky.) We also have our very own Inkling crime scene to decipher, and we learn to write and crack secret codes using this fun decoder wheel. And of course, all detectives go home with a polaroid from our photo booth. (It helps you to write the best mystery story if you wear a moustache!)

My super sleuth colleague Brigitte and I have met some incredible young crime writers and detectives over the three sell-out workshops we have run. It's been our privilege to read some gripping tales like The Case of the Missing Baby, The Stolen Chicken, The Plane of Mystery and Gone! All of them were absolute page-turners.

We love this workshop and can’t wait to run it again in the October school holidays.