ruby redfort
in October '21
we were crossing France and listening to the audiobook of Look Into My Eyes. It’s a pretty formulaic kids detective agency book elevated to genius level by wonderful narration by one Rachel Sterling.
I made about 20 illustrations as an Inktober exercise, but most of them were rather rushed and rubbishy. Others were good though.
Here are those others.
our hero,
Ruby is a twelve year old schoolgirl who wears a hair slide (called a “barette” in the book.)
and her best
chum is a skinny kid called Clancy Crew
clancy
can be trusted to be loyal to Ruby, even in difficult circumstances.
ruby
is an amateur detective who specialises in wearing tee shirts with cynical slogans.
That and solving difficult cases from slim clues.
for example
she can detect the chemical formula for Jade written in mirror language by using a broken powder compact.
now ruby
has rich parents.
Her lovely mummy, Sabina is a particular favourite of mine: an elegant Stepford wife type who can kick ass when called upon to do so in difficult circumstance.
though
most of the time she’s pretty guileless, for example when she is used as a mule at the airport by a mysterious small man with a big moustache.
did i mention
that ruby has a part time job as a codebreaker for a secret intelligence agency? She does!
Her minder is Mitch, the family butler incognito. He gets insructions through a toaster and by means of a watch-radio.
like us all,
Mitch and Ruby have a boss.
The laconic LB goes barefoot and indulges her expensive taste in op art.
while
dispensing assignments that may at first seem uncaring and harsh.
But you know, even LB has a heart.
a little light
relief is provided by the other secret agents, for example the smug but ineffective Froghorn (pronounced Froh-horn by himself and Frog-horn by our iconoclastic heroine)
as you can
imagine, Ruby gets the better of him in their several interactions (though he’s too dumb to realise this)
she also has
a husky to provide a foil for her charming mischief
another incompetent
colleague.
This codebraker for instance is depicted having rushed out of the beauty parlour half-done to play field agent hiding behind a menu to spy on a suspect.
Unfortunately she’s dead now following an offscreen “skiing accident”
nonetheless
Ruby survives abduction by the evil Babyface Marshall
and outwits
master criminal Count Von Viscount, even having lost one of her glittering red clogs in the shrubs!
footnote to mobile site . . . This note appears in a sidebar on computers and tablets . . .
in October '21
we were crossing France and listening to the audiobook of Look Into My Eyes. It’s a pretty formulaic kids detective agency book elevated to genius level by wonderful narration by one Rachel Sterling.
I made about 20 illustrations as an Inktober exercise, but most of them were rather rushed and rubbishy. Others were good though.
Here are those others.
