A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder

Holly Jackson was born and grew up in Buckinghamshire, England. She started writing novels when she was 15 and studied creative writing and English at the University of Nottingham. Her debut young adult mystery novel, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, became a bestseller, leading to three more books in the series and a television adaptation. Jackson has gone on to write standalone young adult novels, including Five Survive and The Reappearance of Rachel Price. She currently lives in London.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, like many contemporary mystery novels, takes inspiration from the recent boom of interest in true crime stories, which began around the mid-2010s. Although the true crime genre goes back much further (for example, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), the mid-1920s saw several television shows (The Jinx, Making a Murderer) and podcasts (Serial) that led to a new wave of interest in true crime and eventually started to influence crime fiction as well, leading to a trend toward more realistic and grounded stories as opposed to improbable and unrealistic whodunnits. The discrimination that Ravi and his family face in the novel also has roots in the anti-immigration sentiment that rose in some parts of the world during this time period. Jackson wrote the novel in England during the period when Britain was still negotiating its departure from the European Union (“Brexit”). Many supporters of Brexit (who voted to Leave instead of Remain in a 2016 referendum) also support tighter immigration restrictions. In contrast to this viewpoint, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder explores how immigrants can become valuable members of a community and how negative stereotypes can be misleading.

Although the roots of the detective novel go back even earlier, almost all modern mysteries have taken some influence from Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes). Like Sherlock Holmes, protagonist Pip is an outsider who searches for the truth outside of the traditional institutions of justice. Another major figure in detective fiction is Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), who also wrote primarily about amateur detectives and who often set her stories in secluded locations, like small towns, as A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder does. Young adult mystery fiction has been its own subgenre since the at least the 1920s and 1930s. This is when The Hardy Boys (a series ghostwritten under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon) and Nancy Drew (ghostwritten under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene) both debuted. Both series feature teenagers who solve crimes that the adults around them can’t. To some extent, all of the above mystery series feature outdated racial stereotypes, and Jackson’s novel is part of a new wave of young adult mysteries that aim to go beyond these stereotypes, such as The New Girl by Jesse Q. Sutanto and The Lies We Tell by Katie Zhao.