James Ponti, author of The Sherlock Society (Aladdin Paperbacks), talks about the dynamic of constant change in series fiction.
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About the book: The Sherlock Society by James Ponti. Published by Aladdin Paperbacks.
In the tradition of Nancy Drew, four kids and one grandfather in Miami tackle a decades-old mystery in this first book in the action-packed and funny Sherlock Society middle grade series from New York Times bestselling, Edgar Award-winning author James Ponti!
Siblings Alex and Zoe Sherlock take their last name as inspiration when choosing a summer job. After all, starting a detective agency has to be better than babysitting (boring), lawn mowing (sweaty), or cleaning out the attic (boring and sweaty). Their friends Lina, an avid bookworm, and Yadi, an aspiring cinematographer, join the enterprise, and Alex and Zoe's retired reporter grandfather offers up his sweet aquamarine Cadillac convertible and storage unit full of cold cases.
The group's first target is the long-lost treasure supposedly hidden near their hometown Miami. Their investigation into the local doings of famed gangster Al Capone leads them to a remote island in the middle of the Everglades where they find alarming evidence hinting at corporate corruption.
Together with Grandpa's know-how and the kids' intelligence--plus some really slick gadgets--can the Sherlock Society root out the conspiracy?
*NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and may contain errors. I have done my best to clean up as much as I can. This process will improve naturally and with time. Thank you for understanding.
INTRO
Matthew: Welcome back to the Children’s Book Podcast, where we dive deep into the world of creativity, storytelling, and the magic behind the art of creating books for children.
I’m your host, Matthew Winner. Teacher. Librarian. Writer. Fan of kids.
Today, we have a truly exciting guest joining us—a master of middle grade and a favorite among mystery and action-adventure readers. We’re thrilled to welcome James Ponti, the acclaimed author of City Spies and several other bestselling book series. James is known for his ability to weave intricate plots with unforgettable characters, creating stories that captivate, challenge, and entertain readers of all ages.
From the thrilling escapades of The Sherlock Society to the fan-favorite City Spies and the action-packed Framed! series, James’s books are filled with suspense, clever twists, and a whole lot of heart. His storytelling has not only entertained young readers but has also inspired them to think critically and embrace the adventure in everyday life.
In today’s episode, we’ll explore James’s creative process, the inspiration behind The Sherlock Society, and what it takes to write compelling mysteries that keep readers on the edge of their seats. Whether you’re an author or illustrator, a teacher or librarian, a parent or middle grade reader, if you are a fan of mysteries and a reader of thrilling series fiction, this conversation is sure to engage and intrigue.
So, without further ado, let’s welcome James Ponti to the show!
INTERVIEW
James: Hey, my name is James Ponti. I am the author of the City Spies books. Um, that's, I've, I've done four book series.
City Spies is my most well known. My newest series is called the Sherlock Society, and that debuts September 3rd, and that's the first Sherlock Society book.
Matthew: Congratulations on a new series, James.
James: That's a very exciting thing for me. Doing two series in one year is very exciting. I think I did not quite factor in how much work that was when I said, Oh yeah, yeah, we can do that.
This doesn't sound too hard.
Matthew: Do you let me, I'm going to go right into asking you a very writerly question. And then I want to talk to you about Sherlock Society. Do two things. I think one, do you think in terms of series, Does your, does your truly? Oh, I love that. When you're dreaming up, do characters come first to plot?
What, what, what is that? And I love that you're getting multiple, uh, adventure stories for these people.
James: So realize, so I, I growing, growing up, I was not a strong reader. I really struggled as a reader. Um, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I decided I wanted to be a writer in fifth grade. I've never wanted to be anything else even for a day since fifth grade, but I didn't know what I wanted to write because I was such a poor reader.
I was just slow at it that, um, I really got into film in middle school and I majored in screenwriting in college and so my career began in kids television. And I wrote series television. So my brain was always trained to think of series. And so it was actually one of those series that they decided to do a book tie in.
And I wrote one of those and I thought, Oh, okay, that's kind of neat. And so when I made the switch over to books, my mind still thinks in series format. So it's my fourth book series. I did actually sell a standalone book, but we've never finished it because the series keep taking all my time. And I, I start with series and I just think that's the way my brain works.
So from a writer's standpoint, it's very different in that, you know, from a very base kind of construction, an idea of a book is the important moment in the life of the protagonists. Right? This is, this is the key change. This is different phrases for it. And that's why so many sequels don't work if the sequel wasn't planned, because it's like, well, we've already discovered the most important moment.
So now you're undoing what you've accomplished to redo it again. But series is not built that way. Series is about the dynamic of constant change among a group of characters in a common setting. And so those are the stories that most appeal to me. And so from the beginning, I'm always thinking series.
Matthew: So you have this new series, The Sherlock Society. Tell me about it. What, what is this series? How are you pitching it? How are you book talking it to readers, to librarians? It's
James: still new. So I haven't gotten though, but basically it's about a brother and a sister named Alex and Alex and Zoe Sherlock, their last name is Sherlock.
Um, and bored for the summer. Not sure what they're going to do over the summer. They convinced two friends to join them to form a detective agency. They call it the Sherlock Society. Pretty early on, so there's no spoiler here, mom kind of crushes that, that you can't have a detective agency. But their grandfather was an investigative reporter and a columnist for the Miami Herald for 40 plus years.
And he has a storage space where he's kept all his interviews, all his tapes, all his notebooks. And in there are decades worth of mysteries, some solved, some unsolved. that he wants to revisit and they revisit with him. They drive around South Florida in his very old classic, um, Cadillac Coupe de Ville named Roberta after Roberta Flack.
And that was, you know, like from the very beginning, the first day I had that, I thought there's no way they're going to let me have a kid's book with a car named after Roberta Flack. And when I went in to meet with my editor to go over the book, I said, you want that changed, right? She goes, no, no, I love that.
We're keeping that. It's like, okay. So there's, there's a whole reason why, when you read the book, why it's named after Roberta Fleck. And that was the launch point. You know, um, I grew up in Florida in a small beach town, um, near Jacksonville, um, which is not Jacksonville could make me support a book, not a series.
It's just not enough that happened there. So I moved it to Miami. I moved my childhood to Miami. And I'm writing about mysteries, Florida, and lifelong friends, which are my favorite thing. So yeah, it's a great combination of me to get to write real joyful, fun mysteries.
Matthew: I know that we are making this for the audio format, James.
I just have to communicate back to you though, though, seeing the joy, the smile on your face just makes me, it's a special thing for a librarian to get to talk to an author, period, or for a kid to get to talk to an author, but to just See how apparent the joy is on your face is lovely. Did you tell you were telling me about doing series television and wanting to be a writer?
And I love that. Where did mystery come in, though? You've got a lot of this like kids pursuing the City Spies series very much is that you write a lot around that mystery space. I want to I would love to know more about that.
James: Sure. So, OK, I I was a slow reader. I'm still not particularly fast. You know, uh, my, my friends who are writers, they, they blow me away with how many books they read.
Matthew: Can I, can I jump in and even tell you, I, I, I was a slow reader as a kid and now. And I don't mind this. I'm not ashamed of this. I, I listen almost exclusively to audio books because audio books seem to be able to read the book to me faster than I can read it to myself. So I listened to The Sherlock Society.
I actually started reading the arc of it. And then I, I finished it by listening to it, which was a great joy, but it's great to also have it in your simple audio.
James: I just got the audio file 30 minutes ago, and I'm going to listen to it on speaker while I'm making gumbo tonight for dinner. It takes a while.
It takes like an hour that I get like a good chunk of it read. Um, so I, I, I was just slow at it and, and I would sometimes give up, but every now and then something, so the, the two things that really broke through, cracked through for me in elementary school, one was from the mix up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Matthew: Yes.
James: The other was Encyclopedia Brown. Um, Encyclopedia Brown was great because they were like 12 page stories. And then you can pick it up and read the next one. That's right. And I didn't notice, but I would read all of them back to back, like I was reading a whole book, because it didn't seem like I was reading a whole book.
But mix up files really worked for me, and I think they work because I can't stand hearing a question and not knowing the answer. Like, you know, and with a mystery, With a mystery you hear the question at the beginning and it's like I gotta know What happens I gotta know what finds out and it dawned on me later in life When interactivity became a thing that really mystery is the genre that is the The closest to being an interactive genre in most other books that you read you are reading an experience and observing and maybe participating But still detached but in the mystery the whole idea is that i'm going to give you the clues And you're going to try to solve it too.
That's kind of the game with the mystery. And so I loved reading those. I love watching and reading mysteries now, movies, TV shows, everything. And so for me, I love that lot device. But if I can just stray for a second on genre, because I have a genre theory that, um, is taken from animal husbandry, believe it or not.
Okay. So I was doing this, I was doing a documentary series for the History Channel. And I did that for like two years. And I was interviewing this, um, cattle, he was an oil guy, but that was what I was interviewing him for, but he was also a cattle rancher. And he talked about this thing he called hybrid vigor.
And hybrid vigor is the concept in cattle, in raising cattle, that if you have two different breed of cattle and you, and they, you cross them. Their children are better than either of them because the way that it works is they take the strongest characteristics of both. And so that's where the best cattle come from.
And that stuck with me for some reason. I'm couldn't, I'm not at all interested in cattle ranching, but that's what I believe in genre and in writing. So what I like to do is I like to take multiple genres and combine them. And I think what ends up happening is The best components of each of those genres elevate to the top, but by not being specifically one Sherlock Society is pretty much a mystery.
I mean if you were to call it a mystery It's hard to say it's not but like City Spies specifically is mystery, but adventure, but family drama and comedy and Sherlock society is also family. And what I think is great about that is, you know, again, I'm a big TV guy growing up and going to film school and studying television, like the very best sitcoms.
Can make you cry unexpected because you're thinking you're gonna laugh and then they'll hit you at this moment like oh my goodness And because all your defenses are down like an after school special when I was growing up, you know Okay, they're gonna try to make you cry in 20 minutes, you know, yeah You don't see it in a sitcom and I like that in the writing So I like having a mystery that really is a mystery But really these other genres on them with the hope that if the reader is focused on the mystery Which is what I want them to do Maybe some of the other stuff will really have a more impactful moment reading and listening.
Matthew: It's that Van Gogh moment from Doctor Who, one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who. Oh, isn't
James: that great?
Matthew: So you even know it, so I don't even need to say it. We can just leave it. For anyone that knows that episode that last five or 10 minutes of the episode, I was like, oh my word. What's happening on this?
James: Well, you know, it's funny. I I am, I have not watched Dr. Who I want to watch it. I saw the clip of him taking Van Gogh. Oh, you've seen the clip, the News Dorse, which is my favorite museum in the world, and, and I thought, I just have to watch this. And when I watched it, it made me think. Oh, I have to watch this show.
I have to watch this series. The problem with Dr. Who is I don't know where to start. But yeah,
Matthew: you just start at the beginning of a doctor. You start with Matt Smith and then that's the way I did it. I started with a doctor and then I could watch the other seasons. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's terrific. I, um, hitting on so many different things here, and I love that idea of starting with a question.
That makes sense, because I was going to ask you about Sherlock Society just in that wonderful way. It feels like the whole book starts with the end, with the culminating action, with this massive thing where we're like, Oh, my word, now, now, now, now, now, The kids are in this big issue with the boat and with getting caught and with all of these moments where we get to suddenly meet all of the characters all at once and then sort of detangle and go back and now let's see how we get there.
And that, when you mentioned that mystery starts with a question, it strikes me that you, as the author in this book, were just filling all of that. are cups full of questions that we then could just get, get, get, uh, thrust through the story, just getting question after question, uh, revealed and more unveiled.
James: I, I, I do like that technique. I do, um, uh, and I hope I don't overuse it, but I, I like starting, going back, you know, there's a couple parts, going back to Reluctant Reader Me.
Matthew: I
James: want the reader of this book to know, I mean, it's, it starts in the moment right after a yacht has, they've had to jump off a yacht and it has exploded in Biscayne Bay.
So that's not giving anything away. That's chapter one, chapter one, page two. Page one, actually. And it starts there because I want the reader to know this is the kind of book this is going to be.
Matthew: Yes. Can I? Can I? I want to take a moment of vulnerability here and just tell you, James, that I into adulthood because I must have had some teacher tell me at one time I made a rule for myself with middle grade with with adult novels that I'm going to read 100 pages minus my age especially if you're middle grade I'm going to read 100 pages minus my age and if the book doesn't hook me by then It's not going to hook a kid by then, or it's not going to hook a reader like me by then.
You hook readers by page one, by page two. It's mind blowing. It feels to me like, wow, this is a guy that's writing for kid me. And I can picture just Well, I'm writing
James: for kid me. Exactly. I'm writing for kid me. You know, the, the, um, there were a couple movies that were really seminal movies for me growing up.
But I think none impacted me more on the type of stories that I want to tell than Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Matthew: Okay.
James: So Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't have a flashback built into it. But Raiders of the Lost Ark starts, and he's being chased by that bull. It's like, oh my goodness, that's what the story's going to be?
I'm on board. And I feel like if you do that, then that buys me a little bit of, okay, since you know it's going to be like that, Let me lay some things down for you.
Matthew: Yeah, because
James: it's going to get back to that. And also I, you know, it's funny. I, I grew up in this culture at Nickelodeon and then writing for PBS where we felt like writing for kids was an honor and responsibility.
Like I, I remember like at some of these places, like, like I remember I did animated shows for PBS, but That you know, we would send them off to they would the scripts would be sent to the some educational think tank at Harvard That would really go over what we were doing and how we were in Because it was so important that what we were introducing to kids.
We were introducing properly
Matthew: Wow,
James: I have young readers who are going to read these books And this may be their first or one of their very first mystery stories they ever read.
Matthew: Absolutely. So they've,
James: they've not been trained, like, like, you know, if, if, if we as adults go and we watch a mystery, we know, okay, well, there's going to be a set up, but there's got to be a cut and there's got to be this and there's got, but I feel like a real privilege and a real responsibility to show them the elements of that.
So I want to start with Here's the big thing. The big thing is the yacht. They get on the yacht and it explodes. And that's the big thing. So now you're looking for that as you read the book. Oh my word. And
Matthew: you're also training us about grandpa emphasizes with his group of kids, the five W's I'm going to assign each of you one of the five W's and that's going to be, you're going to be the master on the Y on the who James.
I'm just realizing you're just training us. You're training us on how mysteries work, on how clues work, on how journalism works. Let's figure out all of the components and also how they interact. I was loving those components too. Cause I felt like I'm coming from school where we love to give kids group work and we love each person to have a role in value in that space.
And so, Having something that you are the expert in allows you to rely on other people and for others to rely on you. But I'm hearing you talk, realizing you're also training those new to mystery readers. This is how it works.
James: I, but training, training takes with it. I, I want it to be more fun than training maybe implies.
I want to, I want to, I want to introduce them to the concepts of it. I want them to embrace the idea too that each kid gets to be an expert in one of the things. Because then it's not just, oh, well, you know, Yachty's really the smart one. It's like, no, they're all smart and they're all smart in different ways.
And they take that different way to, like you said, in this book, each of them is ascribed one of the W's. Um, that they're responsible for as they're investigating. Um, Al Capone. A true story is that Al Capone. Yes. Spent the last parts of his life in Miami before he went to Alcatraz. So, even before he went to Alcatraz, he had already moved his operations from Chicago to Miami.
And in reality, he buried a box with. a ton of safety deposit box keys, and those keys would open in banks millions of dollars. And at Alcatraz, disease racked his brain so much that when he got out, he had no memory of where it was. And to our knowledge, it was never found. His niece hired a hypnotist to come hypnotize him.
They dug up his estate. They never, you know, someone found it and they didn't tell. I don't know. So I thought, well, that's a really interesting place to begin because that's an adventure that's tied to reality. That's in South Florida that, you know, you, you know, kids have heard about the poem. And so I wanted to start with that, but I didn't want to just make it just conversation where the kids were unchangeable.
So it's like, okay, one of them will be in, in researching the Capone story. One of them will know all the who's one of them will know all the wares. One of them, what I didn't get is why and why was when they were all going to, as a group figure out. And that also let me, you know, these plots sometimes are outlandish and city spies and outlandish is the right word.
Most kids aren't spies. Most kids don't solve mysteries. So I'm always looking for ways to make it believable that they're good at things, because As much as I love Sherlock, and I named a series The Sherlock Society, so obviously I really love it. As a viewer of the movies and the TV shows, and I actually haven't read a Sherlock book, I feel cheated a lot of the time in that.
He solves it unfair. I believe in fair mystery. I believe in that the reader, if they really pay attention, can solve it. And it can't come down to, well, I know 247 different types of tobacco and this tobacco was only sold in Singapore. So he has to, and it's like, okay, no, I think that's cheating. So I, I want it to be believable.
So I wanted each kid to believably be, um, uh, uh, in command of one aspect of the story. Okay. So that all together they knew all the story as opposed to they just all knew all everything.
Matthew: Yeah, I love to that Without spoiling at the mid book, as the kids are pursuing leads and finding dead ends and pursuing leads and going, this wouldn't work out.
They together say, well, I know we were hoping for solving this mystery, but there's this other thing going on with these people with polluting part of the Everglades that we really should report this. And maybe, maybe we can be sort of citizen detectives and figure out and report information that. That will help this get solved because of what I learned, which, which was this, uh, this detail about, yeah, plenty of people, uh, dump trash into that ecosystem that just won't ever be.
James: I love starting with the boredom of summer. You know, as kids we love summer but we also kind of Sometimes you get bored in summer, right? I wanted to tap into that and they are really This will be this great adventure and we're gonna get money There's like real money at stake here What they find is, no, actually this matters more than money.
And this is actually not some past adventure. This is something relevant to my life. And I really wanted to tap into that. And I, I think I like stories. I like mysteries that wrap up, but I don't like mysteries that wrap up perfectly. Cause I don't think most mysteries wrap up perfectly. And so I liked the idea of there's some course changes along the way and what they start going for.
But again, that's part of why. I wanted to let you know, I like to think of a plot as being like a car trip that we are driving from You're in baltimore. I'm in florida So you're driving from Baltimore to Florida and you know You're probably going to be on 95 for part of that, but you're going to want to see some pretty stuff You're going to you know, you may you may make turns and detours that are unexpected But you know where you're going and that's why I wanted to start with You start with the yacht.
You know where you're going. You don't know why you're going there, but you know where you're going, so the road doesn't feel aimless, and that gives us the chance to make a couple decisions. turns and changes along the way.
Matthew: I'm so excited for what else you have in store for the Sherlock society. I don't at all want to get ahead of ourselves.
This first book as of recording, this isn't out in the world yet. And I cannot wait to introduce my students. You know, as of recording this, my students come in one week, one week from today, James, my students, I get to welcome my students back into the library. So I want to. Thank you for your time and thank you for your commitment to sharing incredible stories with our readers, with my readers.
Um, I'm going to ask you a question that'll bring us back into that space. I just want to make sure.
James: Can I throw in one thing about that though?
Matthew: Absolutely.
James: All right. So, my wife is a school teacher. And. Her mantra always has been make things for teachers and make it free and make it so all they have to do is click that they don't have to work to put together this thing that you've come up with.
So I've always tried to come up with neat activities and it's gotten more and more advanced and the stuff that we've come up with for Sherlock is really great. I really, I'm really thrilled with it, but it dawned on me at some point. Well, in the book, the Sherlock Society actually starts off as a club at school in the school library.
Matthew: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know that you how much I love the games you came up with the like escape escape room games
James: And I thought maybe we should we should always look for ways to break down the barriers between readers and books Yeah, so maybe the thing should be that libraries can join. Like school libraries can actually join.
And so I started spreading the word. Over 600 school libraries have already joined the Sherlock Society. And they, I send them stuff regularly and I'll have like a, um, I'll have like a Zoom with my editor about how we work together. Just things for librarians to have, to share with students, to make it that much less distant from I'm reading this story to I'm kind of part of this story.
Matthew: I love that. So
James: anyway, so that, that's what I'm hoping as kids get introduced, they might decide, Hey, let's, let's kind of do this. So let's play this. a version of this escape room in the library or let's look into cryptids like the, the swamp creature down in, you know, the swamp ape in Miami. What's our version here in New Jersey or our version here in Maryland or anything?
Yeah. But you had a question and I know we're running out of time, so I'll, I'll stop gamering.
Matthew: No, I, I love it. And now I have another thing to sign us all up for before the beginning of the school year. I wanted to ask you a question that I ask all my guests, which is, I will see a library full of children soon.
Is there a message that I can bring to them from you?
James: Oh, for sure. Um, so many of them. So you can tell them personally from me that Shock Society is my 12th book. I've already written 14. The next two books are already written that are coming out once these guys went shock. They, uh, mass. over, are close to a million words in those books. Yeah, I really struggled reading when I was their age. I really had trouble getting through a book.
And the great lesson that I stumbled into along the way is that each of us has a story to tell, and each of us has a voice, and that story and that voice is unique to us. So even though books might seem like a thing that's not for them, their story matters. And they can try to tell it in a poem. They can try to tell it in a television show or a movie.
I've done all these different ways to try to share the story and the view of the world that matters to me. And eventually I did find it in books. But that their story really matters and that I hope that if they read my book, they like the book. But if they don't, I'm not offended and I don't mind. I just want to make sure they know that there are books in that library that they will love and that the secrets of the world are hidden in them. And if you start reading, there's really nothing you can't do.
OUTRO
Matthew: Thank you to James Ponti for joining me on The Children’s Book Podcast.
You can pick up your own copy of The Sherlock Society (Aladdin Paperbacks) wherever books are found. Consider supporting independent bookstores by shopping through Bookshop.org. You can also use my affiliate link by clicking on the book’s name in our show notes. I highly recommend checking out the audiobook of The Sherlock Society or, really, any of James’ books! They are available through Libro.fm and you can support independent bookstores in the process!
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And on that note…
Be well. And read on.
End Of Episode
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