“The great secrets of reading”: Margaret Meek Spencer, reading process and children’s mystery and detective fiction

ABSTRACT Margaret Meek Spencer’s writings on literacy evoke reading and storymaking as processes of inquiring; of searching into mystery. This paper considers how Meek’s preoccupations with reading process; genre literacy; and text-image dialogism resonate deeply with the genre of young people’s mystery and detective fiction. Drawing on Meek’s seminal works, Learning to Read (1982); How Texts Teach What Readers Learn (1988), and On Being Literate (1991), the paper applies key concepts from these texts to a group of children’s mystery stories. The paper shows how the genre offers a resonant context in which to “take her work on” and to observe the mirroring of certain of her insights in storied form. Moreover, the aptness and theoretical richness of Meek’s concepts in relation to the genre is illustrated, not least when her ideas are considered alongside the work (suggestively cited briefly by Meek herself) of Bakhtin, Bruner, and Barthes.