Combel new list is ready for Frankfurt: Elementary, dear publishers! 🔎

While we are preparing the Frankfurt Book Fair and the new Fall catalogue is on print, we want to share with you the letter from Noemí Mercadé, our Editorial Director:

  Elementary, dear readers!

Mystery literature has always fascinated readers of all ages. Its ability to weave twisty plots and create memorable protagonists has kept the interest of readers of all kinds and from all ages alive.

Who comes to mind when we talk about solving mysteries? Firstly, there is Sherlock Holmes, the most popular detective, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, or perhaps one of the two most famous ones created by Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime: Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, the most meticulous Belgian in detective fiction.

The list would be long if we were to add the extraordinary characters created by writers of equally extraordinary talent, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett or Sara Paretsky, who has broken stereotypes with her female detective V. I. Warshawski.

Mystery fiction has also formed part of children’s and young people’s literature in various registers and, very often, combined with adventure literature, as in the case of the sagas of The Five, by Enid Blyton, and Harry Potter, to mention just two that have been overwhelmingly successful. And what about that detective mouse with the name of an English cheese that has opened up the world of investigation to the youngest children?

Mystery literature for children, in addition to the challenge of keeping them attentive and enriching their imagination, is a powerful tool for their education and growth.

Jean Piaget, in his studies on the evolution of children’s reasoning, tells us that between the ages of six and seven a fundamental cognitive transformation takes place. Children go from a stage in which they use practically no logic to being able to build up abstract and hypothetical reasoning.

If we transfer the mental exercise of a detective, which involves following clues and arriving at a conclusion, to children, we will see that it is an exercise in memory and deductive logic that is ideal for their cognitive development. That is why we can affirm that books will be a great help in this process.

Let’s take as an example the title A Difficult Case, from the series Agus & Monsters, in which the monsters, after the chapter “Learning from the great detectives”, remind us of the method of any good investigator:  Observation-analysis-deduction-checking

Discovering the logical relationship between a clue and what has provoked it or between premises and consequences is a discipline of rigour and subtlety, that the kid learns as a game but that will be useful for the rest of his life.

And not only that, because an enigma often comes to us with many isolated clues and no hypothesis that links them into an explanation in which everything fits together. And the virtue of the great detective lies in his ability to frame the facts in an interpretation that no one had discovered or conceived before him.

This logical ability to infer the hidden causes behind a series of detailed observations until an explanation is found is called abduction, and is used, for example, by Sherlock Holmes, when he arrives at conclusions that are surprising at first but perfectly logical once explained.

Isn’t this, then, the classic outline of all good research and much of our creative learning? Elementary, dear readers!

So, take a notebook and pencil like our Daniel, the Combel detective for the youngest investigators, and write down the perpetrators of this crime: Marta Jarque and Dani Jiménez.

And watch out, because it doesn’t end here! Stay tuned for new cases that will soon come to light, both in the Combel and Bambú catalogues, so that you can enjoy new adventures and unsolved mysteries. 

No mystery. Let’s have a look!