ADRIENNE GAVIN is Senior Lecturer in English at Canterbury Christ Church University College, Kent. She has written entries on a number of children's writers for The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English. - CHRISTOPHER ROUTLEDGE is a full-time writer who has previously taught English and American literature, including children's literature, at several UK universities and colleges. He has published articles on detective fiction and popular culture topics and has written on education issues for The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian.

'I enjoyed reading these essays...a worthwhile book to add to any well-rounded university library...' - Jill P. May, Children's Literature Association Quarterly

• Notes on the Contributors Mystery in Children's Literature from the Rational to the Supernatural: An Introduction; A.E.Gavin & C.Routledge 'so great and beautiful that I cannot write them': Religious Mystery and Children's Literature; P.Pinsent Nancy's Ancestors: The Mystery of Imaginative Female Power in The Secret Garden and A Little Princess; M.J.Moran The Juvenile Detective and Social Class: Mark Twain, Scouting for Girls , and the Nancy Drew Mysteries; T.Boone Children's Detective Fiction and the 'Perfect Crime' of Adulthood; C.Routledge Digging up the Family Plot: Secrets, Mystery, and the Blytonesque; D.Rudd Plotting the Past: The Detective as Historian in the Novels of Philippa Pearce; V.Krips The Secret Development of a Girl Writer: Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy; R.A.Morris Apparition and Apprehension: Emergent Womanhood and Supernatural Mystery in Novels for Children by Women Writers; A.E.Gavin Possessed by the Beast: Subjectivity and Agency in Pictures in the Dark and Foxspell; C.Bradford 'There are Worse Things than Ghosts': Reworking Horror Chronotopes in Australian Children's Fiction; J.Stephens & R.McCallum The Mysteries of Postmodern Epistemology: Stratemeyer, Stine, and Contemporary Mystery for Children; K.Coats Harry Potter and the Mystery of Ordinary Life; C.Routledge Enigma's Variation: The Puzzling Mysteries of Avi, Ellen Raskin, Diana Wynne Jones, and Chris Van Allsburg; A.E.Gavin Index