The Invisible Detective is a series of juvenile adventurenovels, written by Justin Richards. Originally published in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2005, the series has also been released in the United States.
An adventure is an exciting experience that is typically a bold, sometimes risky, undertaking. Adventures may be activities with some potential for physical danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting or participating in extreme sports.
Justin Richards is a British writer. He has written science fiction and fantasy novels, including series set in Victorian or early-20th-century London, and also adventure stories set in the present day. He has written many spin-off novels, reference books and audio plays based on the long-running BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who, and he is Creative Consultant for the BBC Books range of Doctor Who novels.
The books are detective fiction with science fictional and/or fantastic elements (depending on the book). Set in London in the 1930s, the series recounts the adventures of four children, Art, Jonny, Meg, and Flinch, who act as "Baker Street Irregulars" to the detective Brandon Lake, who is known as "the Invisible Detective" as no one has seen more than his silhouetted figure in a darkened room. In fact, Brandon Lake does not exist; he was invented by the four children, who investigate all his cases themselves. Art plays the Invisible Detective in weekly sessions held in a darkened room, during which the Detective addresses the concerns of local residents, in exchange for a small fee.
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.
Science fiction is a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, and extraterrestrial life. Science fiction often explores the potential consequences of scientific and other innovations, and has been called a "literature of ideas".
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction set in a fictional universe, often without any locations, events, or people referencing the real world. Its roots are in oral traditions, which then became literature and drama. From the twentieth century it has expanded further into various media, including film, television, graphic novels and video games.
Each book also has a parallel subplot set in the 2000s, where Art's grandson, also named Art, and his friend Sarah have related mysteries to solve.
Titles
The titles in the series are:
The Invisible Detective book series
Book Number
Title
Publication Date
ISBN
Cover Illustrator
Length (Pages)
1
The Paranormal Puppet Show (renamed Double Life in America)
The series revolves around the cases of eponymous detective, Brandon Lake. The books' protagonists are the Cannoniers, a group of four children in 1930s London who solve mysteries. They are based out of Cannon Street, hence their name. They invent the character of Brandon Lake and portray him in weekly consulting sessions in a darkened room. The Cannoniers are:
An eponym is a person, place, or thing after whom or after which something is named, or believed to be named. The adjectives derived from eponym include eponymous and eponymic. For example, Elizabeth I of England is the eponym of the Elizabethan era, and "the eponymous founder of the Ford Motor Company" refers to Henry Ford. Recent usage, especially in the recorded-music industry, also allows eponymous to mean "named after its central character or creator".
Arthur "Art" Drake: The leader of the Cannoniers, Art possesses good leadership skills and often develops the plans for the group. Though tall for a 14-year-old boy, he is slightly built, with dark brown hair. He acts as Brandon Lake, the Invisible Detective, providing his voice and silhouette figure in the armchair.
Flinch: The youngest of the Cannoniers at only 9 or 10 years of age, Flinch is short and slight of build, with long, bedraggled hair. She lives on the streets without any family that she knows of. Besides being streetwise, she can also squeeze through small gaps by dislocating her joints at will.
Jonny Levin: A thin 13-year-old with short black hair, Jonny mans a fishing rod during Lake's consulting sessions, which he uses to flick hastily written messages to Art in the armchair when necessary. The line is invisible in the near darkness of the room. Jonny is a quick runner, a skill he developed due to frequent bullying from older boys at school. He also serves as the treasurer of the Cannoniers due to his talent for handling money.
Margaret "Meg" Wallace: Almost as tall and old as Art, Meg prefers wearing very covering clothes, such as long-sleeved shirts and high-necked collars. She has long auburn hair and rarely smiles. She can instinctively tell when someone is lying, which she learned from being around her violent father and uncaring brothers.
Leadership is both a research area and a practical skill encompassing the ability of an individual or organization to "lead" or guide other individuals, teams, or entire organizations. Specialist literature debates various viewpoints, contrasting Eastern and Western approaches to leadership, and also United States versus European approaches. U.S. academic environments define leadership as "a process of social influence in which a person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task".
A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single color, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the hole is typically presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all. The silhouette differs from an outline, which depicts the edge of an object in a linear form, while a silhouette appears as a solid shape. Silhouette images may be created in any visual artistic media, but were first used to describe pieces of cut paper, which were then stuck to a backing in a contrasting colour, and often framed.
Hypermobility, also known as double-jointedness, describes joints that stretch farther than normal. For example, some hypermobile people can bend their thumbs backwards to their wrists, bend their knee joints backwards, put their leg behind the head or perform other contortionist "tricks". It can affect one or more joints throughout the body.
Art's grandson, Arthur Drake II, is a main character who lives in the present day. In The Paranormal Puppet Show, Arthur seeks shelter from the rain in an antique shop, where he buys Art's famous casebook and the loadstone that was used to control the puppets in 1936. Throughout the books, he learns about the Cannoniers' cases, and in Stage Fright, the loadstone switches him and his grandfather, sending him to 1937 London and Art to the present day.
An antique shop is a retail store specializing in the selling of antiques. Antiques shops can be located either locally or, with the advent of the Internet, found online.
Recurring characters
Recurring characters in the series include:
Sarah Bustle: Sarah goes to the same school as Arthur, but is a year above him. She has long black hair that she often wears in a ponytail. She lives with her mother, Linda, and her 7-year-old brother, Paul. She is very headstrong, somewhat like Meg. In Ghost Soldiers, Sarah is revealed to be behind a series of modern websites dedicated to the Invisible Detective.
Detective Sergeant Peter Drake: Peter Drake, a Scotland Yard detective, is the father of Art Drake, the leader of Cannoniers, and the great-grandfather of Arthur Drake. He often works the same cases as the Cannoniers, leading Art to rely on him for clues at times.
Charles "Charlie" Etherbridge, Earl of Fotherington: Charlie is an elderly man with a wrinkled face and a kind voice and eyes. He becomes allied with the Cannoniers after alerting them to a watchman searching empty buildings where they were hiding. He becomes a representative for the Invisible Detective, but not does learn the truth about "Brandon Lake" until Faces of Evil. He can speak Latin.
Harry Jerrickson: Harry Jerrickson is the owner of the antique shop where Arthur seeks shelter in The Paranormal Puppet Show. He is friends with Art Drake, Arthur's grandfather.
Albert Norris: Albert Norris is the landlord of the Dog and Goose pub. He and his customers are often drive the plots of the books by bringing cases to the Invisible Detective. Norris is described as a large man, almost as broad as he is round.
A ponytail is a hairstyle in which some, most or all of the hair on the head is pulled away from the face, gathered and secured at the back of the head with a hair tie, clip, or other similar device and allowed to hang freely from that point. It gets its name from its resemblance to the tail of a pony.
A website or Web site is a collection of related network web resources, such as web pages, multimedia content, which are typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com, and amazon.com.
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), the territorial police force responsible for policing most of London.
Footnotes
1 Original title "The Faces of Evil". When the book was reprinted, "The" in the title was removed.
2 All the covers were redesigned by the new artist, Frankland, and all new books (Web of Anubis onwards) had Frankland's art as the original.
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