Mysterious deaths always seem to delight

Murder. Mysterious deaths. Mummies. They all add up to a “can’t miss” booktalk. “Delicious death,” as Agatha Christie used to call her favorite subject. Some recent and gloriously illustrated books about historical bodies serve up a tantalizing spread.
     Like Christie, Sibert Award-winner Sally M. Walker knows how to hook a reader. The cover of her Written in Bone: Buried Lives in Jamestown and Colonial Maryland (Carolrhoda, 2009) displays the skeleton of a boy whose life must have been a horror story. Who was he? Not long ago, Walker started watching and helping archaeologists dig up the graves of settlers who had died centuries earlier in Maryland and Virginia. Her book tells us some of what the experts learned.
     The skeleton of that boy was thrown in a trash heap in the basement of a house over 300 years ago. The family living there at the time had two indentured servants. Historians learned that one of them was a teenager. The boy was horribly sick. He had teeth that must have caused him absolute agony. His bones showed signs of never-ending hard work. Archaeologists theorize that the youth got in an argument with his master (he probably wasn’t working hard enough—no one ever got a sick day in the 1670s). The argument ended with death and a quick disposal of the body.
     Ask your students about their latest visits to the dentist. You won’t believe what Walker reveals about teeth! Also, read about the amazing post-mortem facial reconstruction of a teenage girl: the first ever done of an African colonial. Walker’s book is compelling, down to its very marrow.
     So is James Deem’s Bodies from the Ice: Melting Glaciers and the Recovery of the Past (Houghton, 2008). Global warming may be a problem, but it can also present an opportunity. When glaciers melt, things appear—like human bodies. In the early 1990s, two German tourists were mountain climbing in the Ötzal Alps between Austria and Italy. The weather was warm, and they discovered a body in the thawing ice. It didn’t take the police long to realize that this was not a recently dead body. The clothing was strange. An unusual ax lay nearby. In fact, the body was over 5,300 years old! The iceman was nicknamed Ötzi (rhymes with Tootsie). Your audience might have some theories about how the iceman arrived at his final destination.
     Deem also examines the mummified bodies of children found in the Andes mountains, and the body of a man named George Mallory who tried to climb Mount Everest in 1924, and then vanished. Experts wondered for years whether Mallory made it to the top before he presumably fell to his death; if his body could ever be found, the mystery would be solved. Well, he was, but the mystery wasn’t. Mallory continues to mystify.
     Finally, Elizabeth MacLeod’s Royal Murder: The Deadly Intrigue of Ten Sovereigns (Annick, 2008) gives us 10 true stories about royal people who met unusual ends.
     Cleopatra, Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula), and Marie Antoinette are familiar names in MacLeod’s gallery, but others are less so. Read about the beautiful empress Elisabeth of Austria, whose assassin had a life goal of murdering a royal person, any royal person—and she just happened to be handy.
     And what about those poor little princes in the Tower of London? The older boy, Edward V, was too young to be king, so his Uncle Richard kindly volunteered to rule until he was old enough. Then, somehow, they died mysteriously, clearing the path for their uncle’s coronation. Or did they? There’s no record of a funeral. Did someone kill them? Or were they whisked away to a distant exile?
     Mysterious deaths and disappearances provide lively discussion topics. Audiences in grades five and up will love hearing these gory, intriguing tales. As Agatha Christie knew, you can’t go wrong talking about bodies in the library.