GREAT DETECTIVES Book Club and Creative Writing Workshop


Join us and get lost in a different world each month: the foggy streets of Victorian-era London, busy newspaper offices in a 1960s Midwestern city, a teen detective's office hidden deep inside a California junkyard... This course is so much fun: nine classic sleuth novels, from 1890-1985, serve as jumping-off points for a creative writing curriculum packed with fun collaborative exercises and particularly engaging writing assignments. Students (age 11-14) publish original work and build up impressive writing portfolios. Note: the books for this course are all detective stories, but the creative writing curriculum is not solely focused on writing mysteries.


Course dates: Semester 1: October 5 - January 28, 2026. (No classes Dec 21-Jan 1) Semester 2: February 4 - June 17, 2027.
Tuition: $288/full course, $170/Each Semester, $45/month. Students may join Great Detectives at the beginning of any calendar month, if space is available.
Class size: 20 students max. Sign up early to avoid disappointment.

COURSE TEXTS:
October: Emil and the Detectives, Erich Kästner (1929)
November: The Secret of Terror Castle, Robert Arthur Jr. (1964)
December: The Red House Mystery, A.A. Milne (1922)
January: The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin (1978)
February: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, Lilian Jackson Braun (1966)
March: The Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie (1930)
April: The Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman (1985)
May: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
June: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie (1926)
Course Requirements: GREAT DETECTIVES students will need to log-on to our course forum on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Total weekly time commitment: 3-5 hours/week. All students will need access to a computer, and copies of the books listed above, to participate in this course.


ENROLL NOW


Pay for the whole course, the first semester or by the month. Please note: if you wish to sign up 'by the month,' you will need to wait until October when this course begins - otherwise you'll be paying monthly for nothing until then; our platform unfortunately lacks a way to 'start monthly payments later.' Space is not guaranteed.

Second Semester will be available for purchase in December 2026.



All tuition fees are in USD.




Course details: This course is designed to serve as a rigorous, meaningful extracurricular activity or as part of a homeschool language arts curriculum. We have capped the 2026/27 cohort at 20 students so that we are able to closely read each student's work and carefully scaffold the exercises and assignments to support individual growth.
Our primary goals in creating and delivering GREAT DETECTIVES: 1) grow student capacity to read and enjoy syntactically complex, non-contemporary, adult-level fiction, 2) introduce a variety of genres and writing styles and create repeated experiences of writing as a joyful, generative experience; 3) create a supportive creative community in each cohort, 4) introduce students to the value of a deep dive into one genre across time, both as an exercise in literary history and as a way for young writers to explore the generative force of genre conventions and structures, 5) introduce young readers to authors and book series that offer students excellent options for future recreational reading. This course features five titles that have many sequels, opening up vast opportunities for further reading.

Notes on the booklist: These books are widely available used, often for under $5. We recommend checking your local used bookstores and second hand shops, or ordering from Thriftbooks.com or used book sellers on Amazon. These books are all also widely available at public libraries; lining up borrowing dates with the course can be tricky, however, so we recommend buying a copy of each book. We strongly discourage the use of ebooks for this course. 
NB: Some titles - especially the Sherlock Holmes - are available in a variety of formats, including abridge and graphic novel editions. Please ensure you buy the original, full text.

Admission Guidelines: This course is open to students ages 11-14. This is a course designed to get students reading and understanding adult-level, pre-digital age novels - books that are considerably more complex, less hold-the-reader's-hand, and richer on many levels than contemporary middle school/junior high fare. If your student reads roughly 'at grade level' for grades 6-9, they will be able to succeed in this course. If your student is generally ready but reads slowly, audiobooks are available for some of the titles in this course and may be a helpful tool. Avid reader but reluctant writer? We have worked with many young writers who bloom once they are in a writing community with purpose (other people will read and engage with their work!) and creative autonomy (important for all young writers - please, give your student creative space while working on this course: do not critique, edit, or compare your student's written work to that of other students!).

Code of Conduct: All students must abide by our code of conduct while participating in our course forums:
1) Be nice. Don't be mean.
2) Be curious.
3) Abide by the online safety rules introduced on day 1 of each course (no sharing external links, no sharing last names or addresses, no profanity, etc).
4) Abide by the guidelines given in each course for responding to peer work.
5) No contemporary politics (discussing the historical political context of course texts is fine).