Title Post: The Saxby Smart series
Today's title post comes from Saxy Smart series author Simon Cheshire.
(This is me at home in Warwick. Please do not adjust your screen - I look like this. The books on the left are UK editions, the ones on the right are the US versions.)
Saxby Smart, brilliant schoolboy detective, has been solving mysteries over here in the UK for just over three years. He's not very good at practical things, and he and mathematics are never going to be best buddies, but the one thing he is good at is logical deduction. So he solves crimes!
I started writing about him because I'd always enjoyed reading detective stories, and it suddenly occurred to me one day that I'd never tried to write one. The garden shed that Saxby uses as his Crime HQ is based on the one that's in my own garden – it's also filled with teetering piles of gardening and DIY stuff.
(This is my trusty old workstation. Notice the scratches, coffee stains and broken 'ESC' key. I run Linux Mint on it, using OpenOffice to write my books, Weebly to maintain my website and PacMan to waste my time.)
I'm often asked where his weird name comes from. At first, he was going to be called Ed Deadly, because I thought that sounded a perfect name for a detective. But 'Ed Deadly' didn't suit his character – that name implies someone in a trenchcoat and hat, lurking in a dark alleyway. And that's not Saxby at all. In the end, I literally picked his name, totally at random, from a website that suggests baby names. Saxby. It just sounded right. It's a medieval name, apparently.
His two best friends, Isobel (otherwise known as Izzy) and George (otherwise known as Muddy), take their names from my own children. The real George and Izzy are nothing like their fictional counterparts, it's just their names I've used. They wanted me to point that out.
The 8th book in the series has just been published over here, which means that Saxby has tackled 24 mind-mangling mysteries to date. I always try to make sure his adventures walk that fine line between being believable and being genuine puzzles: I didn't want him to get involved in mudane, trivial stuff, but at the same time he's a kid, so he can't go around investigating murders and poisonings like most fictional detectives!
What I didn't expect, when I started writing the series, was that the books would be so popular in schools. It's because of the interactive element to them. I wanted to do something DIFFERENT with the detective story, so I eliminated the detective's sidekick. Several times in each story, Saxby stops the narrative and asks you, the reader, a question about the case. There's no Watson to Saxby's Holmes. You are his sidekick. Readers tell me that some of the questions are easy to solve, and some of them are very tricky – which is exactly what I wanted! I've found that teachers read the stories a lot in class. When it gets to the puzzles, the whole class try to work out the answers together.
(Here I am talking to a Year 6 class at a school in Liverpool)
Right now, I'm finishing work on a non-fiction Saxby book, “Saxby Smart's Detective Handbook”, which is all about the world of detectives, both fictional and real-life. Doing the research has been fascinating - and sometimes very gruesome!
If you've got any questions about Saxby or his adventures, you can email me through my website at www.simoncheshire.co.uk , where you'll also find free chapters, some photos and a video or two.
You can follow Saxby Smart on Facebook or YouTube.
If you're interested in the wider world of books, you can read “Simon's Blook Blog” at www.simoncheshire.wordpress.com
Or you can follow “SimonTheWriter”s stream of mental garbage on Twitter.
Booksellers, Teachers
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