Posted on by TracyC

Ruth Fielding at College

Ruth Fielding

Ruth Fielding at College; or The Missing Examination Papers by Alice B. Emerson (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1917.

Ruth Fielding and her friends have graduated from their boarding schools, and now, they’re headed off to college! Ruth and her best friend, Helen, will be attending Ardmore, a college for young women only. Helen’s twin brother, Tom, will be going to Harvard. When they were at boarding school, they also attended girls’ only and boys’ only schools, but their schools were located near each other, and they were able to visit each other on weekends and attend joint social events held between the schools. Helen and Tom are close as twins, and Helen worries that she won’t be able to see her brother as often while they’re in college. Tom and Ruth are also fond of each other, and although they’re excited about college, they’re also a little sad at the idea of being apart.

The Rescue

While they’re having tea with Aunt Alvirah (the housekeeper), the hired hand working for Ruth’s Uncle Jabez, Ben, comes in and says that there is a boat adrift on the river that runs by the mill where they live. Everyone goes outside to have a look at the boat. At first, they think no one is in it, and Uncle Jabez says, if it’s abandoned, then he will go after it as salvage. Then, they see that someone is in it after all, just lying down in the bottom of the boat, but the boat is drifting toward the dangerous rapids below the mill! Whoever is in the boat seems incapacitated or unaware of their dangerous situation.

Uncle Jabez is less eager to go after the boat when he knows there’s somebody in it than he was when he thought he could get a free boat, but Ruth persuades him that they have to rescue whoever is in the boat. They manage to reach the boat, and they find an unconscious girl in it. They bring the girl back to the house with them, and Tom says that he will get a doctor. However, Aunt Alvirah doesn’t think that a doctor will be necessary because it looks like she has only fainted, and she thinks that the girl will be all right.

When the girl wakes up, she explains that her name is Maggie and that she was working at Mr. Bender’s camp for summer vacationers up the river. After the season ended, the vacationers left, and Mr. Bender paid her for her time at the camp, someone was supposed to give her a ride across the river with her luggage, but Maggie fell asleep while she was waiting in the boat. When she woke up, she was drifting down the river alone. She got scared, and she fainted. Ruth says, if her job is over, then she has no reason to return to Mr. Bender’s camp, and Maggie says that’s true and that she needs to find another job. Ruth says they can use their telephone to call Mr. Bender’s camp to explain the situation and reassure Mr. Bender that Maggie is all right.

Ruth likes Maggie, and she notices, from the way she talks, that she seems more refined than most poor working girls. Aunt Alvirah is getting older, and she often has trouble with her rheumatism. Ruth suggests to Uncle Jabez that they hire Maggie to help Aunt Alvirah at the mill this winter while Ruth is away at college. Uncle Jabez is still a miser and he grumps about Ruth spending his money. Ruth has money of her own now, and she is willing to pay Maggie’s wages, although she says that Uncle Jabez must make sure that Maggie has good food because she looks undernourished. Ruth and Uncle Jabez often butt heads over the issues of money and Ruth’s education because Uncle Jabez never had much education and is both proud of the money he has now and is tight-fisted with what he has. At this point, the story explains some of the history of the characters. Since Ruth retrieved a stolen necklace for the aunt of one of her school friends and received a reward for it (in Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies), Ruth has had enough money to be financially independent of her uncle and to fund her education. She is also correct about Aunt Alvirah’s age and health, and she is concerned for the older woman’s future.

Aunt Alvirah welcomes the idea of help at the mill, and Maggie accepts the position. Ruth notices that Maggie studies an Ardmore yearbook, and she is surprised that Maggie is interested in the school. She has the feeling that there is more to Maggie’s past than she knows.

Arrival at Ardmore

When Ruth and Helen go to Ardmore, some of the girls have already heard about Ruth’s reputation as a writer of movie scenarios from the movie that Ruth wrote and her classmates helped make to raise funds to replace a dormitory that burned at their school. Some of them are prepared to despise Ruth as being stuck up about her writing, although some who saw the moving picture liked it.

A girl named Edith thinks that they’ll have to “take her down a peg or two” as soon as she arrives. One of the other girls, Dora, reminds the others about the rules against hazing at the school. The rules have been strictly enforced since a hazing incident went too far last year and traumatized a student, Margaret Rolff, who was trying to join the Kappa Alpha sorority. Since that incident, the college has forbidden sororities to initiate freshmen or sophomore students as members and cracked down on hazing rituals. Edith, a sophomore, thinks that’s a shame because the sororities are fun, while May sarcastically remarks about how fun “half-murdering innocents” is. The students aren’t really supposed to talk about what happened to Margaret, although the sophomores don’t see why not because everybody who was at the school when it happened knows about the incident.

Margaret’s nerves were apparently shattered by the incident, and a valuable silver vase, an ancient Egyptian artifact, disappeared from the college library the same night. It isn’t entirely clear what the Kappa Alpha sorority told Margaret to do, specifically, but it seems that Margaret’s initiation task involved both taking the vase from the library and going to nearby Bliss Island alone at night. She was found there the next day in a terrible state. Nobody is sure what happened to the vase, and Margaret was apparently unable to explain it. She left the school soon after, and nobody knows where she is now. The vase might have been stolen by somebody else that night, or it might have somehow been lost in the confusion of the initiation stunt that went wrong. Because the Kappa Alpha sorority was responsible for telling Margaret to commit a theft from the school (or, at least, borrow a rare and valuable object without permission), they are raising money to replace the vase. The students’ opinions about the incident waver back and forth between thinking that Margaret was a naturally nervous and delicate person to be so dramatically affected by the incident to thinking that maybe she faked her trauma as an excuse to get away with the theft herself.

When the other girls start discussing Ruth Fielding again and how grand she must think herself, being involved with the movie industry, a plump girl who is listening to them starts laughing, but she refuses to tell the other girls why. Then, a wealthy-looking girl with a lot of fancy luggage arrives at the school, brought by a chauffeur. Her luggage is stamped with European labels and has the initials “R. F.” on it, so the other girls assume that this must be the overly-grand Ruth Fielding. The plump girl struggles not to laugh as she watches their reactions because she knows Ruth and knows that this girl is someone else.

Meanwhile, Ruth and Helen have traveled to the school by train and are coming from the train station by bus. They arrive at their college dormitory, Dare Hall, just in time to see the other girls giving “R. F.” a hard time because of her fancy luggage. When Edith addresses “R. F.” as “Miss Fielding”, “R. F.” corrects her in front of the other girls, telling her that her real name is Rebecca Frayne. The plump girl, Jennie Stone, laughs at Edith’s presumptuous mistake and greets the real Ruth Fielding and Helen.

Jennie Stone was one of their fellow students at their boarding school, Briarwood Hall, in upstate New York. She was affectionately known as “Heavy” because she’s always been “plump” (or, as the book sometimes calls her, “fleshy”). Ruth and Helen are surprised to see Jennie at Ardmore because they thought that she was lacking some credits to go to college, but Jennie says that she made up those credits, and she wanted to go to college because she really had nothing to do after graduating from Briarwood but eat and sleep and put on more weight. There is some joking about Jennie’s weight, and Helen gives her a teasing pinch, but Jennie reminds her that she has feelings, too. People in Jennie’s family are naturally big, but she is determined that, as part of her college experience, she will lose weight. She wants to keep busy and reform her diet. The mathematics instructor at Ardmore has been advising her about her eating habits, urging her to eat more vegetables. The teacher seems to be hard on Jennie on the point of her weight, but the teacher openly tells her that’s only because she cares about Jennie. She knows that Jennie will want to make friends in college, and she won’t want to get a reputation as the heaviest girl in her class. It’s hard on Jennie, but she appreciates the teacher’s advice and the fact that she cares.

The mathematics teacher, Miss Cullam, also privately confides in the girls that she’s worried about the incident that happened on campus last year. She has some suspicions about the older classes of girls, although she can’t really prove anything against them. Few other people know this, but Miss Cullam admits that she had hidden some papers for last year’s mathematics exam inside the vase that disappeared from the library. It was an impulsive move and only meant to be temporary hiding place for them, but when she tried to get the papers out of the vase, she couldn’t because they were stuck. She went to get some tongs to retrieve them, but by the time she returned to the library, the vase was gone. At exam time, several students that she had not expected to pass her class did unexpectedly well on their final exam. She can’t prove that they got hold of the papers from the vase, and she hates to think that any of her students would cheat, but she still suspects they did. It bothers her that she doesn’t know for sure that they didn’t. Although the vase had value itself, the mathematics teacher’s story raises the possibility that someone knew that the exam papers were in the vase and that was the motive for the theft.

Campus Politics and the Mysterious New Girl

Ruth, Helen, and Jennie talk about the politics between the freshmen, sophomores, and upperclassmen in college. Edith seems undeterred by her earlier mistake and still gives Ruth a hard time about her writing and budding movie career. It doesn’t entirely surprise Ruth that people would give her a hard time because she is a noticeable figure among the freshmen, and having been to boarding school, she knows how things typically work among cliques and class levels at school. Although some of what Edith says embarrasses her and hurts her feelings, she knows that it’s best not to make too much fuss about the things people say, and just wait for it to blow over. It helps that Helen and Jennie stand by her and stand up to the other girls on her behalf. Ruth is somewhat reassured that hazing is forbidden at Ardmore, so she expects that little will happen other than occasional mean comments.

Although hazing is forbidden on campus, the college does allow the upperclassmen some privileges over the underclassmen. They do it with a purpose in mind, using it as a tool to get the freshmen to bond with each other and solidify their class leadership. Few freshmen pay attention to the elections for class president until the seniors put up notices to tell the freshmen that they must all wear baby blue tams (hats), that no other colors will be allowed, and that the freshmen only have three days to comply. The freshmen aren’t sure what the upperclassmen will do if they don’t comply, and some of them are resentful about the upperclassmen commanding them to buy new hats. Helen, like some of the others, initially thinks they should just ignore the command and not bother, showing the upperclassmen that they won’t be bossed around, but Ruth decides that she would rather buy and wear one of the tams because she doesn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to herself and maybe more resentment from the older girls on campus. When they go shopping in town, they see that every shop is selling baby blue tams, and one shop keeper (described as a “Hebrew” for no real apparent reason and having an accent that seems to indicate that he’s an immigrant) comments that blue is their class color, which gives the girls a clue that this is an organized campus tradition or stunt with the support of the local businesses. Because those tams are everywhere in town and other freshmen are buying them, even most of the reluctant freshmen end up with one of those hats. After that, the freshmen realize that they need to get serious about organizing their class leadership so the upperclassmen won’t be dictating everything to them.

There is one hold-out among the freshmen who doesn’t buy one of the tams, and that’s Rebecca Frayne. She just keeps wearing the same tam she was wearing when she arrived at school. When the three days are up, and Rebecca still doesn’t have a baby blue tam, the upperclassmen start boycotting her. If she comes to class in her usual tam, they all get up and walk out. They even walk out on meals when they see her. This seems like more of a punishment for the upperclassmen, who have to leave without finishing their meal, than it is a punishment for Rebecca, and someone does point that out.

(I see what the students say about these traditions being bonding experiences, but I really don’t have any respect for these catty and manipulative tactics because it looks dumb, and I think it just disrupts class for everyone to have so many students walking out. I think my college professors would have counted them as absent if they walked out of class over a dumb hat because student social activities need cannot impact the education they are supposedly here to receive and have no place in the classroom. Whatever they do needs to be done on their own time, not on the teacher’s or the class’s time. Actually, I did have a professor who used to award extra points to students who showed up on days when class attendance was low due to bad weather or people ditching class for sporting events. He would have us take notes or a short quiz and write a special phrase at the top of the paper as a sign that we were there that day when others weren’t, like “Rainy Day Faithful” or “Sports Day Faithful.” I kind of wanted to see the instructors in the story do something similar. On the other hand, if they self-punish themselves by sending themselves away from the dinner table, I’m inclined to think it’s deserved. I’d be inclined to let them do that until they get hungry enough to stop. It’s a rare example of a problem that will eventually solve itself.)

However, Rebecca’s apparent defiance of the social order even gets on the nerves of her fellow freshmen. The others have come to appreciate the bonding experience of buying the matching hats and solidifying their support of their own class leadership. It was a ridiculous and high-handed order from the upperclassmen, but ultimately, a fun and harmless one, a reason for a short shopping trip, and only a minor expense that supports local businesses. The other freshmen don’t understand why Rebecca isn’t joining in with them in class solidarity. Rebecca doesn’t mix much with the other students, and the others think that she doesn’t want to be friends, although Ruth can see that the boycotting she’s suffering is hurtful to her.

However, there may be another explanation for Rebecca’s behavior besides defiance or stand-offishness. Ruth begins to realize that Rebecca not only always wears the same hat but that she’s only ever seen Rebecca wear the same three outfits, over and over. They’re good quality clothes, but it’s odd that she never seems to wear anything else. Although they all saw Rebecca arrive at college with a lot of luggage, more than the other students had, she either doesn’t seem to have many clothes or never wears the other clothes she brought. From the way she arrived and the amount of luggage she had, everyone expected that Rebecca would be the wealthy fashionista of their class, but that hasn’t been the case. Is Rebecca not as wealthy as they thought, and could her choice to not buy a blue hat be because she can’t afford one? But, if her luggage wasn’t full of fashionable clothing, what was really in her large trunk? Ruth becomes concerned about her and tries to figure out what’s really going on with Rebecca.

Mystery on Bliss Island

Meanwhile, Ruth, Helen, and Jennie have been exploring the area around the college. One day, the three of them go to Bliss Island to have a look around. Jennie is hoping that hiking around the island will help her in her quest to lose weight. While they’re exploring, Ruth thinks that she sees someone else on the island. She doesn’t get a good look at this other person, but she thinks it looks a lot like Maggie. Helen thinks that she must be wrong because Maggie is supposed to be helping Aunt Alvirah back at the mill. Later, Ruth sees a light on the island at night and realizes that someone must be camping there.

When Helen and Ruth go to investigate who is camping on the island, Ruth expects to find Maggie. Instead, they find a strange girl who seems to bear a resemblance to Maggie. This other girl seems suspicious and doesn’t want to explain much about herself. What is she doing on the island, and does it have anything to do with what happened on Bliss Island during the hazing incident?

The book is in the public domain and is available to read for free online through Project Gutenberg.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The Mysteries (and some spoilers)

In a way, this story is what I had hoped that Ruth’s first adventures at boarding school in Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall would be like. It doesn’t have any spooky stories, but there is an unresolved mystery involving the initiation rituals of a campus sorority, the theft of a valuable object, and a possible cheating scandal. There also also mysteries about the behavior of other students and girls Ruth knows. At first, I thought there might be a connection between all of these things, but the mysteries aren’t call connected.

Ruth is correct that Rebecca isn’t as rich as she looked at first. When Ruth speaks to Rebecca privately, Rebecca explains that her family was once wealthy, and they still live in the biggest house in their small town, but the family’s fortunes have diminished over the years. Her aunt, who takes care of her, thinks it’s important to keep up appearances, which is why she has a few nice clothes but not many. The family has to make real sacrifices to keep up the pretense that they have more money than they really have, and Rebecca arrived at college thinking that she would have to make an impression on the others at the beginning that she came from money so they wouldn’t think that she didn’t belong.

Ruth explains to her that college isn’t really like that. Not everyone at college has much money, and many other girls get part time jobs, like waitress, to pay for their education. Belonging at college comes from participating in activities with everyone else, and Rebecca is pushing other students and potential friends away by not joining in the traditions of the college. Personally, I thought the other students were being too militant about this silly hat thing. I get how people can bond over shared traditions and how school traditions and spirit events are meant to be bonding experiences, but I just think that they went overboard, making too much of a big deal about this one student, with only Ruth thinking to actually talk to her and find out what’s going on with her. It does beg the question of whether the students are really focusing on this as some kind of school initiation/bonding ritual for the fun of it or because the older students are on a power trip and trying to exert control and be exclusive. In a lot of ways, I share Olivia Sharp’s feelings about exclusive clubs and initiation rituals from The Green Toenails Gang. It’s one thing if a club has a particular purpose, but being pointlessly exclusive is something else. This is something that Ruth actually addresses with the upperclassmen later, which was a relief.

However, even though Ruth is sympathetic to Rebecca, Ruth points out to Rebecca that her resistance to participation with the other students is causing problems in her relationships with others. When she doesn’t do what everyone else is doing, she isn’t sharing in their experiences and doesn’t bond with them. That’s when Rebecca says she really can’t afford to buy one of the blue tams, and her aunt would never allow her to take a part time job because that would ruin the pretenses the family tries to maintain about their actual money troubles. Ruth thinks the Frayne family pretenses are as silly as I thought the students’ militant hat ritual was, but she can see that a more creative approach is necessary to solve Ruth’s problem. Rebecca knows how to crochet, so Ruth suggests that she crochet a tam for herself in the baby blue color of their class because that would be cheaper than buying a tam. This will allow Rebecca to participate in this campus ritual and tradition but on her own terms and within her budget.

Then, Ruth quietly has a word with some of the senior students and freshman students about Rebecca’s situation to keep them from harassing Rebecca further while she’s working on her new tam and so they won’t give her a hard time about anything related to money. She even stands up to the seniors and tells them that, if their enforcement of the tam rules was for the sake of campus tradition and creating a memorable bonding experience among the students, they should have compassion for Rebecca and her situation, but if it was only to bully and exert power over the younger students, she will tell the other freshmen that’s the case, the freshmen will completely rebel, and everyone will stop wearing the hats or doing anything else the seniors say to do. If the upperclassmen continue to insist on leaving the dining hall in the face of their disobedience, the freshmen will make sure that the upperclassmen don’t eat on campus for the rest of the year. The seniors understand the situation, appreciate Ruth standing up for her classmate, and like her spirit, so they finally lay off their boycott of Rebecca.

Ruth also helps Rebecca solve her money problems when she realizes that Rebecca has brought something with her to college that is worth real money. Rebecca’s trunks were from the attic of her house, and she brought them just to create the illusion that she had more money and belongings than she really does, but she hasn’t appreciated the value of what they contain. Rebecca has many lessons to learn about the real value of many things. The contents of the trunk seemed a little anti-climactic at first because I had initially thought the story was building up the idea that she might be carrying something more suspicious, maybe something illegal or a smuggled person, but I liked the theme that Rebecca and her family know more about the superficial look of things rather than their true value.

The mystery of Rebecca and her behavior is an interesting side plot that adds dimension to the main plot and mystery, which concerns campus politics and initiation rituals and what happens when they go too far. Most of the rest of the plot and mysterious happenings centers around what happened to Margaret and the vase. In some ways, the solution to that problem turns out to be disappointingly simple. Margaret was a very nervous person who, although academically bright, was too easily influenced by other people and unable to stand up for herself. When Margaret got nervous and messed up the initiation ritual, she didn’t know how to explain herself and fix things. The situation does get resolved, and Margaret is fine. (You might have even guessed where she is through most of the story.)

However, I thought the story did a good job of demonstrating how social initiation rituals and school stunts can get out of hand when closed societies don’t consider how the things they do or ask others to do affect other people. The sorority didn’t really know Margaret as a person before they set her a task that was more difficult for her to do than it might have been for someone else, and Margaret was too timid, nervous, and anxious to be accepted by others to explain how she really felt about it or refuse to do it. This is part of the reason why the school later forbids the sororities from initiating freshmen and sophomores, so the younger students have time to get to know the campus and its groups, develop some confidence, and understand what’s acceptable for a group to ask and what isn’t. Having the sororities only recruit upperclassmen also gives them time to get to know prospective members and set appropriate tasks for people who know their own limits and when the groups are asking too much. The task should also not have involved taking a valuable object that didn’t belong to the sorority and putting it in a position where it could be lost. That is the Kappa Alpha sorority’s fault for setting a task that really wasn’t appropriate under any circumstances.

I liked the multiple mysteries of the story, the ones that connected to each other and the ones that were more stand-alone. There’s also a brief subplot where some of Ruth’s friends fake a haunting to get a relative of a faculty member to move out of her room in their dormitory so they can use the space. Before she came, that room was being used as a public sitting-room for the students, and they resent her taking it. The students involved in the plot don’t tell Ruth what they’re doing or ask her to join them, but they explain it to her when they’ve accomplished their goal. I appreciated that the plot was subtle, just making subtle noises at night using a rocking chair.

Characters That Age and Develop

Up to this point in the series, Ruth Fielding and her friends were teenagers at boarding school. Now, they’re becoming young women and young men in college. I liked how aspects of their college life resemble their experiences at boarding school, but the characters show that they are now more experienced. The things that happen with the social politics on campus build on the girls’ earlier boarding school experiences, but they are now more aware of the dynamics of these situations and how to deal with them. There are some times when it’s better to go along with the group for the sake of building friendships, but there are also sometimes when they have to stand up for themselves and others and tell the groups on campus that they’ve gone too far. There are times when it’s better to take some teasing and let it go, and there are times when teasing and enforcement of group conformity goes too far, and someone needs to be told to stop and go easier on someone. They still have things to learn, but it was nice to see their development and the use of things they have already learned. Students like Rebecca and Margaret suffer more at college at first because they are more new to the large school environment, and they don’t understand what others expect from them or when and how to stand up for themselves. They need some help from compassionate, experienced students to find their way.

Readers also see main characters are continuing to build their future lives and develop as people. Ruth has already started her writing career, and through the story, we are told that she is still working on a play she’s writing, and she and her friends also take part in the filming of another movie during a school break. Ruth is planning to go further in her writing and movie career, and she is serious about using her education to develop her career.

We don’t know as much about what Helen and Jennie are planning for their futures. Helen’s family is wealthy, so she technically doesn’t need a career, but she is a serious student. Jennie’s trait of being overweight, something which has helped to define her character through the series is interesting in this story both because Jennie stands up for herself and emphasizes that she has feelings and so more than just a fat person to be made fun of, and she’s also decided that she wants to change her image. While her teacher urges her to eat healthier, Jennie also starts joining in the sports on campus. At first, it’s difficult for her, but she gradually becomes stronger and more athletic, and she enjoys it. College is a time for people to experiment with their lives, habits, and self-image, and Jennie specifically wanted to go to college for that reason as part of her personal development.

I didn’t like the repeated references to Jennie as “plump” or “fleshy.” I did like seeing her try new activities to change her appearance and develop different sides of her personality, but the older Stratemeyer Syndicate books do have this odd focus on describing characters’ weight. Heroines are usually described as “slim” or “slender”, pleasant sidekicks are “plump”, and villains and unpleasant characters are actually fat. These designations appear repeatedly in various Stratemeyer Syndicate series, although I think they finally stopped doing it after people raised public awareness about fat shaming. In Jennie’s case, I minded it less than I’ve minded the weight references less than I’ve minded it in other books because she does remind people of her feelings and because her decision to try to improve her weight situation was her own decision rather than one she was bullied into making and is an extension of her trying new activities, experimenting with her self-image, and the college experience of personal development. Jennie was at a point in her life where she felt the need for a change, so she’s just going for it.

At this point, I want to remind readers that characters who develop and change are rare in Stratemeyer Syndicate books, at least the ones that most people remember from their childhoods, because in the series that are still in print, the characters’ ages are frozen.

Characters That Never Age

I’ve pointed this out before, but one of the hallmarks of most of the classic Stratemeyer Syndicate books that most people remember reading when they were growing up is that the characters never age. In series like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, they’re always in their late teens or early twenties, and their exact age often isn’t specified. Readers just know that they’re old enough to be traveling around and doing things without adult supervision, sort of like the characters in the Scooby-Doo cartoons. Also, like Scooby-Doo cartoons, the series get redone about every decade or so to update technology, slang, and world circumstances so that the books take place roughly around the time when they were written. (For example, you won’t find any Cold War references in books written after the 1990s, and existing books for series that were still in print were rewritten and reissued in the mid-20th century, around the time of the Civil Rights Movement, to remove unacceptable racial terms and stereotypes.)

However, it’s worth reminding readers that this wasn’t always true of Stratemeyer Syndicate books. The oldest series produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate are often unknown or forgotten by modern readers because the characters did age. As the series ran their course, characters grew up, graduated from school, married, and became parents themselves. When Stratemeyer Syndicate characters got too old to be teen detectives or young adventurers, the Stratemeyer Syndicate would simply stop producing their series and start a new one, often with characters who were somewhat similar to characters in previous series but not exactly the same, so they could continue writing series with similar themes and a similar feel, but also a little different. Ruth Fielding is one of those forgotten characters because she did age, and her series ended around the time that the first Nancy Drew books were published. Nancy Drew was meant to be the next generation series to Ruth Fielding, a similar character who has investigates mysteries and has adventures with her friends, but by that point, the Stratemeyer Syndicate realized that, if they never let Nancy age, they would never have to end her series or replace her with anyone else. This is the reason why 21st century readers know who Nancy Drew is, but not many people know Ruth Fielding.

Also, because Ruth Fielding books weren’t being produced during the mid-20th century, when existing Stratemeyer Syndicate books were being revamped and modernized, the Ruth Fielding books were not modernized. The movie industry, which becomes increasingly prominent in the books, makes silent movies because the stories are set in the 1910s. There are some racial terms in books, while not being deliberately insulting, also don’t sound right because they’re not polite by modern standards. It did throw me a bit when the book referred to a shopkeeper as being “Hebrew.” I think I might have heard this before in relation to Jewish people (I can’t remember where right now, although I think it might have been an older book as well), but not often. Using the word “Hebrew” in this way is acceptable in some languages, but not in modern English, and it is considered a derogatory reference by modern standards. It took me out of the story temporarily when I got to that part because I had to stop and think it over. I came to the conclusion that the kind of person who would use “Hebrew” instead of “Jewish” to describe a Jewish person sounds like someone whose primary knowledge of Jewish people comes from reading the Old Testament rather than talking to them in life. Then, after I considered that, I had to stop and consider how Ruth Fielding could know that the shopkeeper was Jewish without even knowing his name or him saying anything about it. I suppose it might have been his general look, but that’s not always reliable. More importantly, it’s a case of the author telling us something as if it makes a difference to the character or the scene when it doesn’t. This goes absolutely nowhere. Ruth has never seen this shopkeeper before because she’s new in town, and we never see him again. This is why writers are discouraged from bringing up people’s racial or ethnic backgrounds unnecessarily because it sounds like they’re trying to make a point about something when there’s no point. This is also why I don’t mind rewrites of books that include outdated or unacceptable racial terms because I read them as a distraction that actually takes away from the story. I suppose, from a scholarly viewpoint, it’s kind of informative about the way people spoke in the past, but from the point of view of someone just trying to enjoy the story, it acts like a speed bump that shakes the reader out of it.

I don’t think the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books ever connect the characters with any world events with known dates because that would also mark the characters’ ages relative to events and make it obvious that they don’t age over time, but the Ruth Fielding books do connect to world events, and we’re almost to the point in the series when the characters become directly in World War I. I’ll have more to say about that when we reach that point in the series.

Posted on by TracyC

Lady Margaret’s Ghost

Felicity, An American Girl

Lady Margaret’s Ghost by Elizabeth McDavid Jones, 2009.

This book is one of the mystery stories published to accompany the American Girl series of historical books. The main character of this book, Felicity Merriman, lives in Colonial era Williamsburg, Virginia, around the beginning of the American Revolution.

Felicity’s mother is going on a trip to visit a relative, along with Felicity’s younger siblings. As the oldest girl in the family, Felicity will be in charge of the household while her mother is gone and her father and his apprentice, Ben, are working in the store her father owns. It’s a big responsibility and an honor that Felicity’s mother considers her capable of managing the household, but because Felicity is still young and some household tasks involve heavy work that is difficult for her to do alone, her mother has hired a temporary cook, Mrs. Hewitt, to help her. Because Felicity is known as a daydreamer who doesn’t always pay attention to what she should be doing, her mother reminds her to focus on the task at hand while she’s minding the house, although she has faith in Felicity and is sure that she will do a good job.

Soon after her mother leaves, a crate arrives at the house for Felicity’s father, along with a letter. The letter explains that a cousin of Felicity’s father has died and that the crate contains some family heirlooms that his cousin left to him. These heirlooms once belonged to a common ancestor of theirs, Sir Edward Merriman, a wealthy nobleman and the first member of their family to live in the colonies, more than 100 years earlier. Felicity’s father didn’t know his cousin well because they never lived very close, and his cousin was much older, but he does know the history of the heirlooms. The heirlooms include a lady’s silver vanity set and a silver cup and rattle for baby. The story is that Sir Edward’s wife, Lady Margaret, owned the vanity set, and the rattle and cup were for their infant son. Unfortunately, the baby was stillborn, and Lady Margaret died shortly after the birth. After her death, her husband and the household servants believed that she still haunted the house. The haunting may have been part of the reason why Sir Edward decided to leave his home in England and go to America, but even though he later remarried and had other children, he could never bring himself to part from the things that belonged to his first wife and child. Even before Felicity’s father tells her about the ghost story, Felicity gets a strange feeling from the vanity set, and she wonders if the objects could be haunted.

However, Felicity soon has to turn her attention to household issues. Mrs. Hewitt, the temporary cook arrives, and she is a brusque and unpleasant woman. She is rude and condescending to Felicity when they are working in the kitchen together. Because Mrs. Hewitt is so rude, Felicity is nervous and makes mistakes, making her look like more of a fool to Mrs. Hewitt. They can’t easily replace her because cooks are in demand right now because this is Publick Times in Williamsburg, and there are many visitors to the city. Everyone is busy tending to them. Mrs. Hewitt was the best they could find available. Felicity’s father does speak to her about her rudeness to Felicity. After that, Mrs. Hewitt is sullen and resentful, and she is even more pleased whenever she sees Felicity doing something wrong.

There is also an exciting event taking place. Felicity has entered her horse, Penny, in a horse race at the fair in town! Ben, her father’s apprentice, will ride her. The day of the race, Penny seems to be doing well, but then, she suddenly develops a problem during the race. When Felicity and Ben check her out to see what was wrong, they discover that someone put burrs under Penny’s saddle! Worse still, the wounds caused by the burrs become infected. Felicity is very upset and worried about Penny, and she wonders who would have hurt her horse. There were a couple of men looking at her before the race. There was also a boy named Dawson and a girl called Anne.

Dawson turns out to be a runaway, but he also has some knowledge of horses. Although Felicity is a little suspicious of him at first, Dawson helps to heal Penny’s wounds. He also says that he saw Anne gathering burrs, but it was probably on behalf of someone else.

When Felicity realizes that her treasured coral necklace, which her mother also wore as a girl, has disappeared, Felicity questions whether she carelessly lost it or if someone has stolen it. Felicity has been doubting herself and her ability to manage the household because of all the mistakes she has made since her mother left, and the clasp of the necklace was a little loose. This could just be another disastrous mistake, but it is suspicious that Anne seemed so friendly to her at the race and then ran away from her later. Anne also literally bumped into Felicity at the race. Could she have taken the necklace? Dawson seems to think so, but then again, can Felicity really trust everything he says?

Felicity still gets an odd feeling from Lady Margaret’s heirlooms, and she thinks that she sees something white moving around at night. At first, she thinks that it could be Lady Margaret’s ghost, but then, strange things begin happening around the house. Things disappear, and Felicity worries that maybe she carelessly mislaid them. Then, her necklace unexpectedly turns up, and Lady Margaret’s vanity set vanishes! Are these strange things part of the haunting of Lady Margaret or the work of a thief? If it’s a human thief, is it the work of the runaway Dawson, mysterious Anne, unpleasant Mrs. Hewitt, or the mysterious person who arranged for Penny to be hurt?

The book ends with a section of historical information about Colonial era Williamsburg. The story is set during Publick Times, which was when court was in session in Williamsburg. People would gather in Williamsburg during Publick Times to see the trials in court and attend a public fair in Market Square. The fair offered various kinds of entertainment, games, and races, like the horse race in the story.

My Reaction

The story leaves it a little ambiguous at the end about whether Lady Margaret’s ghost exists, but if she does, she is not harmful and has nothing to do with the thefts in the story or what happened to Penny at the horse race. As the section of historical information explains, there are many new visitors in Williamsburg during Publick Times. This was a good setting for the story because there are many strangers to the city with unknown pasts and motives, and crowds at the fair might harbor thieves.

Part of the story and part of the section of historical information in the back focuses on the subject of orphans. Both Dawson and Anne are orphans, and neither of them is really being cared for. Dawson admits that he used to steal to support himself after his father died, but he is seriously looking for work. Anne technically has a guardian, but her guardian is abusive and uses her as a servant rather than taking care of her.

When the thefts occur and mysterious things start happening around the Merriman house, both Dawson and Anne look like the best suspects, but there are also possible adult suspects. Even after Felicity realizes Anne’s situation, she isn’t entirely sure which of the men at the fair that day is Anne’s guardian. Mrs. Hewitt also looks suspicious because she is so unpleasant and seems to be trying to make trouble for Felicity. I though the book did a good job of supplying an array of suspects to consider. The solution to the mystery was one of the possibilities I thought was most likely, but there were enough other possibilities to make the story interesting.

Posted on by TracyC

The Windy Hill

The original cover is public domain and available through Wikimedia Commons

The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs, 1921.

Oliver and Janet are spending the summer with their mother’s cousin, Jasper, who is a wealthier man than the rest of their family. Janet is enjoying the visit and Jasper’s grand house so far, but Oliver is very uneasy there. Oliver doesn’t like the vast, empty house, and he’s noticed that Jasper’s manner seems different from he remembers the last time they saw him. Oliver senses that something is troubling Jasper, something that he doesn’t want to discuss. Jasper is usually a cheerful person who enjoys his cousin’s children, but during this visit, he hardly pays attention to them and never smiles. Janet finds things to do to keep herself occupied, but Oliver is terribly bored and bothered by Jasper’s odd behavior.

Then, one evening, Jasper sees Oliver looking at a nearby house. He says that the people who live in that house are also cousins of theirs, but he’s been too busy lately to see much of them. Jasper apologizes for having neglected Janet and Oliver during their visit so far, and he says that he will invite Eleanor, the daughter of the cousin who lives in that house, to lunch the next day. Eleanor is close in age to Janet and Oliver, and Jasper thinks that they will be friends and that a visit from her will liven up the visit for them. Janet is pleased at the idea of another girl cousin visiting, but Oliver is at that phase where he doesn’t like girls. He can’t imagine that he would have anything in common with this unknown girl cousin, and he thinks he’ll be bored while Janet and Eleanor have fun together. He tries to tell Jasper as much, but Jasper is just amused by his attitude and tells him that, if he is afraid of girls, the sooner he gets over it, the better.

When Jasper orders his car and driver to take Janet and Oliver to see Eleanor, Oliver decides to rebel by going to the train station and trying to get a train home. However, while he is waiting at the train station, he becomes curious about the countryside around him and the nearby river he hasn’t yet investigated. He wanders off to explore a little and encounters a man and a girl at a nearby cottage. The man and the girl ask him to help them with their beehives. Oliver is a little nervous of the bees at first, but he follows the beekeeper’s directions and finds himself enjoying the work. The beekeeper and his daughter, Polly, invite him to join them for lunch afterward. After a lunch of biscuits, honey, and iced cocoa, Oliver feels much better about everything.

Polly thinks that she and her father have somewhere they need to be after lunch, but her father tells her not to worry about that. Instead, he entertains Oliver and Polly with a story about a Native American medicine man, a boy who is curious about what lies beyond the ocean, and their first encounter with white people. By the time the story is over, Oliver realizes that he has missed his train. He decides to return to Jasper’s house, where he is told that Janet didn’t go to see Eleanor because Eleanor was delayed somewhere. (Guess where.)

More and more, Jasper’s odd mood becomes apparent. His servants have also noticed how worried he’s been, and it seems like he’s always more upset after a mysterious and disagreeable man comes to see him. Nobody knows who he is or what his visits are about. Oliver knows how to drive, and Jasper has Oliver drive him out on a mysterious errand one evening to see someone. Oliver doesn’t know who Jasper talks to or what they say to each other, but the visit takes a long time, and it makes Jasper angry.

Oliver’s visit with Jasper gets better because Jasper allows him to use the car by himself from that point on. He takes Janet to visit the Beeman and Polly. Although Oliver is still not enthusiastic about girls, he likes Polly because she is very different from how he imagines that cousin Eleanor must be. The Beeman says that they have to pick up some new beehives that day, and Oliver volunteers to take the girls to get the hives from a man named John Massey. John Massey complains about his landlord, who hasn’t been maintaining the dikes. Massey has had to take it on himself, and the burden is becoming too great for him to bear.

It turns out that Massey’s landlord is Anthony Crawford, the unpleasant man who has been troubling Jasper. Crawford also seems more than happy to let Olive and Janet know that he is also a cousin of theirs. He seems to be under the impression that Jasper has cheated him in some way. Jasper says that he’s already given him what he’s entitled to have, but Crawford says that his share should be more than that. Crawford says that, if Jasper doesn’t give him what he really owes him, he can take everything Jasper has and destroy his reputation in the process. There are secrets in their family’s past that would cause a scandal if the public knew about them, and Crawford says that if people knew that there was one crook in their family, they would all be suspicious that Jasper is much the same way.

Oliver doesn’t know what to think of Crawford’s insinuations or his threats. Not knowing who else to turn to, Oliver explains the situation to the kindly Beeman and asks him what he should do to help Jasper. The Beeman knows far more about everything that’s been happening than Oliver knows, and he say that Crawford has unknowingly been laying a trap for himself. Crawford thinks he’s pretty sharp in his dealings with other people, but he’s been neglecting something very important. Actually, multiple things.

In a series of stories that the Beeman shares with the children, he indirectly tells the children the history of their family and quarrels that go back generations. He tells them about a family with a shipping business that restored their lost fortunes during the War of 1812 by turning to piracy. He tells them about siblings divided by quarrels over money during the Gold Rush. Although the Beeman doesn’t admit to the children that all of his stories are true in the beginning, they soon come to realize that they are and that they are directly connected to the them and the current situation.

Toward the end of the book, the Beeman ties all the pieces of the puzzle together before telling them the final story, the one about three cousins named Jasper, Anthony, and Thomas, who were all raised together and were very close, until they had a falling-out over Anthony’s scheming and his unethical dealings. There are reasons for everyone to resent Anthony for his meanness and greed, but the Beeman is correct that Anthony has set himself up for a fall. He really should have listened when everyone tried to tell him to fix the dike.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies) and Project Gutenberg. Because it is in the public domain, there is also a LibriVox Audiobook recording.

My Reaction and Spoilers

The Family’s Story

In some ways, the story of the family in the book is also a celebration of American stories. The short stories about different generations in their family are set at turning points in American history. Something that fascinated me about these stories was that they were not all glowing about these points in American history and their associated legends. There are parts of the stories that emphasize the bold American values of adventure and ingenuity, but there are also dark sides and downsides to the stories and flawed characters. The family fortunes were set partly by piracy, but one of the heroes of the family was the man who realized when it was time to stop. Members of their family have been consumed by greed and quarrels, although some have overcome their flaws and misconceptions to come together and be a family again. Again, the Gold Rush story resolves happily when the brothers involved also realize the folly of endlessly pursuing riches at the expense of relationships with the people they love. There is even a slight rebuke against the westward expansion of the United States – portrayed heroically but also as highly costly as people died and killed others over land and gold and promoting an endless, unhappy quest for more and more, with people living their whole lives never feeling satisfied. In short, the family, like the stories and American history itself, is a mixed bag, and they are at their best when they realize their wrongs and make the decision to change. For a book from the early 1920s, a period of heightened patriotism and prejudice after WWI, it seems remarkably insightful and self-aware.

It was Anthony’s decision to forge a relative’s name to get money to cover his unethical dealings that ruined his relationship with his family. It was only by their charity and intervention that he wasn’t charged with his crime and sent to prison. He’s fully aware of that, but he’s been resentful about it rather than grateful. Even from a young age, Anthony had always coveted what other people had. Even if he didn’t really want things for their own sake, he would go through elaborate schemes and bitter fights to get what someone else had, just because someone else had it. Out of greed and spite, he has resurrected old property quarrels in their family. He not only got the old house that was originally willed to Jasper, but he has been scheming to get Jasper’s new house. The Beeman (who is the third cousin in the last story and father of Eleanor, who is called Polly as a nickname) says that Anthony should have headed the lessons learned by their family during the Gold Rush, that always reaching and reaching for greater prizes means never being satisfied with what one has and risking its loss in pursuit of the unattainable.

In the end, when Anthony’s scheming and corner-cutting leave him with no one to turn to but the family members he has harassed and schemed against, he finally experiences a change of heart. I find stories where the villain has a sudden change of heart after long-term villainy to be unrealistic, but the crisis that Anthony realizes he caused is sudden and serious. Because he has neglected the dike and driven away the people who were helping to cover his negligence at their own expense, he suddenly realized that he has endangered many lives, and everyone knows that it’s all his fault. He schemed to get control of that land but didn’t take care of it when he had it. Everyone knows what he did, nobody’s going to cover for him, and while he’s unscrupulous enough to scheme to get others’ property, he doesn’t want to be responsible for killing people. It’s enough to make him swallow his pride and acknowledge the reality of the situation to his cousins. They help him for the sake of the people in danger, and in return, he decides to leave the area.

In the end, Anthony takes a hard look at himself and his life, and he realizes that he and his wife and children were better off when they lived in another community, where he was forced to work for a living instead of by his schemes. He now fully understands his weaknesses and temptations, and rather than continuing to resent the things and people in his life that stop him from furthering his schemes, he has come to welcome them as the guiding forces that keep him from making destructive decisions. The way he phrases it struck me as a little corny, almost like the end of a PSA, but I approved of the sentiment. His family members made him angry because they saw him for who and what he was, but the point is that he now understands who and what he is himself. Although the others are willing to allow him some leniency because of the way he handles the crisis, Anthony realizes that he must give himself the discipline he needs and be the changing force in his own life.

Overall, I thought it was a pretty good story, although there are a few issues with racial language related to Native Americans. I’m not sure if there is a modern revised version of this story or not. The version that I’m reviewing is the original from the 1920s.

Native Americans in the Story

I found the first story the Beeman tells, the one about the Native Americans, fascinating because the story contains the concept that Native Americans arrived in the Americas by crossing the Pacific Ocean and moving eastward across the continent. I know that’s the modern concept of the origins of Native Americans, but I was surprised to find the concept in a book from the early 1920s. I didn’t realize that people in the 1920s had that concept because I thought the older theory was that Native Americans crossed a land bridge.

During the story about the Native American medicine man, the book uses the term “squaw”, which is a controversial term because, although it apparently can mean just “woman” in some Native American languages, it can mean something vulgar in others. Modern books avoid the use of the word, but it appears in some older books, like this one, because white people weren’t always aware of the connotations the word could have. This is the danger of using words you don’t fully understand. It isn’t meant in an insulting way in this book, but be aware that the word appears here and that it isn’t a good word to use yourself. If you’re referring to a Native American woman, just say “Native American woman”, and leave it at that.

The book also uses the word “Indian” instead of Native American, something that also appears in older books. I’ve explained before that this hearkens back to a much earlier misunderstanding about who Native American peoples were, and the nickname has stuck to a certain degree. However, modern convention is just to say “Native Americans” because it’s both a more accurate description and less confusing than explaining American Indians vs. Indians from India. I don’t mind the use of that term too much because it isn’t insulting. However, the book also occasionally uses the term “Red Man” to refer to Native Americans. The characters saying that don’t seem to use it out of malice, but I still think it’s inappropriate. I think that sort of thing went over my head when I was a little kid because I knew people were referred to as “white people” and “black people”, but after I was old enough to understand that there were other connotations to the term it became one of those terms that I think of as “derailing terms.” Even if the characters use it in a non-hostile way or kind of thoughtless way, we (the readers) know that there are hostile or demeaning connotations to the term. It just derails the train of thought of readers like me because we stop to process whether or not the character is trying to be insulting or demeaning, and it just distracts from the rest of the sentence and the thread of the story. I’m generally in favor of reprintings of books like this, with the racial terms updated because, provided that the author and characters are not trying to be demeaning or insulting, a change in the language can clarify attitudes and put the readers’ attention back where it belongs – on the story itself.

Native Americans also appear in the story about the Gold Rush, as risks encountered by westward travelers. Their appearance in the story is minimal, if stereotypical.

Posted on by TracyC

Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse

Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse by Jean Lewis, illustrated by Richard Lowe, 1975, 1983.

Scooby-Doo’s friends are building a new doghouse for him! They can’t decide what color to paint it, so they make half of it red and half of it blue. Scooby loves his new doghouse, at first, but then, something spooky happens!

One night, Scooby comes running into the house, scared. While Scooby cringes under the covers of Shaggy’s bed, Shaggy gets a flashlight and goes outside to see what scared Scooby.

When Shaggy looks in the doghouse, he sees a glowing pair of eyes, and then, something white runs past him with a shriek! Scooby and Shaggy both stay inside for the rest of the night, and in the morning, they tell their friends that they think the doghouse is haunted.

Their friends are sure that there must be some other explanation for what happened, but who or what was in Scooby’s doghouse?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

Scooby-Doo was my favorite cartoon when I was a kid, especially Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, and I’m still nostalgic about it! The mystery in the story is very simple, but suitable for young children with nothing truly scary about it. Even kids might guess what the solution is before the characters realize what’s in the doghouse.

Now that I think about it, it seems out of character for Scooby-Doo to have a doghouse because I don’t think he had one in the original cartoon series. I remember that he had a fancy one in one of the later spin-off series, but in the original series, he just always slept inside with his human friends. Of course, one of the hallmarks of the Scooby-Doo series is that there isn’t really a strict canon. Details about the characters and the Mystery Machine can change from episode to episode to suit the story without any real explanation because it’s a just-for-fun series.

One of the things that I liked about this book was that it reminded me of all the other books I read as a kid that were based on popular cartoon characters. I think most of the cartoon series from my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s also had related books. On the back of this book, there are pictures of other books in this series, based on other Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, including other Scooby-Doo picture book mysteries.

Posted on by TracyC

Double Trouble

Double Trouble by Barthe DeClements and Christopher Greimes, 1987.

Faith and Phillip are twins and the only members of their immediate family who are alive. Their parents and their older sister were killed in a car accident. Faith was taken in by their aunt, but their aunt didn’t think that she could manage to care for two children, so Phillip was sent to a foster home. The story is written in the form of letters to each other (this is called epistolary style) after their separation.

Separating is cruel, especially when they’re orphans, but there is something about Faith and Phillip that other people don’t know. They have psychic powers, and they have the ability to communicate their feelings to each other with their minds. They have to communicate specific information to each other in writing because their psychic abilities only communicate their general mood and circumstances, but their psychic link to each other makes them feel less alone when they’re apart. Apart from dealing with their grief over the loss of their parents and the changes to their lives, each of them is also in a troubling situation.

In her first letter to Phillip, Faith tells him about a disturbing encounter with a teacher at her new school. Faith was selling candy with another classmate, Sue Ellen, to support the school band. Sue Ellen gets the idea of going by Mr. Gessert’s apartment. Mr. Gessert is their social studies teacher and is considered one of the cool teachers in school. Faith can tell that Sue Ellen has a bit of a crush on him. He buys one of their candy bars, and Sue Ellen asks to use his bathroom. When Sue Ellen seems to be taking awhile, the teacher goes to see if everything is okay, and he catches Sue Ellen snooping around. He gets especially angry when Faith is about to touch his cane near the door. He grabs both girls by the arm and throws them out of the apartment. Although snooping in someone’s private rooms is rude, the girls are startled by how angry Mr. Gessert is. Faith asks Sue Ellen what she saw in his apartment, and Sue Ellen says that she didn’t see anything. She had just started to open the door to a room when he found her. The next day, Sue Ellen brags to other kids at school about having been in the teacher’s apartment, but Faith is still concerned about how angry Mr. Gessert was.

When Phillip replies, he says that he can understand why the teacher would be annoyed at someone snooping through his stuff, and he tells Faith about his new foster parents, the Wangsleys, Howard and Cynthia. He’s now living in Seattle, about 50 miles from where Faith is living. Phillip also got picked on at school by a bully, but a girl named Roxanne spoke up for him. He thinks Roxanne is pretty, and he describes her aura as being indigo. (The twins also have the ability to see people’s auras and use them to learn things about other people.) His new foster parents don’t take his vegetarianism seriously, trying to convince him to eat meat. They say that God put animals on Earth for people to eat and that he has to eat like they do. Their house is shabby, and Howard keeps Cynthia on a tight budget. That surprises Phillip because he thinks Howard must be making decent money at the shipyards. He wonders how Howard spends his money, if it’s not on his wife or home. He knows that Howard and Cynthia belong to some kind of religious group and that, whenever they return from one of their meetings, they act strangely, and their auras are weird. He’s still grieving their parents and sister, and with all the stresses of his new home, the only time he feels better is when he’s using astral projection, to get away from it all.

The twins learned their psychic skills from their sister Madalyn and Madalyn’s friend, Roger, who is an archaeologist. Faith doesn’t quite have Phillip’s ability with astral projection, but she can sometimes get visions of other people and what they’re doing. She uses this ability to try to learn more about Mr. Gessert, and she sees that his cane is actually a gun. She watches him loading it. Why would a teacher have a cane with a hidden gun?

Faith is still angry that her aunt didn’t take Phillip, too. She also hesitates to ask her aunt for things she needs because she doesn’t want to seem like a charity case. She has a part-time job taking care of her neighbors’ dogs while the neighbor is on vacation, and she uses the money to buy a pair of second-hand boots. When Aunt Linda finds out that Faith bought second-hand shoes, she says that Faith should have told her that she needed shoes because she doesn’t want people thinking that she isn’t taking care of her niece. Still, after she cleans them up, they don’t look bad, and she gets compliments on them at school.

The next time she sees Mr. Gessert in class, he seems normal at first. He gives the class a lesson on the Donner Party of pioneers, who were trapped by a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. (This is actually described in gruesome detail in the book. Some kids like a good gross-out, but I never did.) After Mr. Gessert describes all the gory details in class, one of Faith’s other classmates comments that Mr. Gessert seems crazy. Faith knows that he was telling them the truth about what happened, but she finds it disturbing how much he seemed to enjoy recounting all the grossest parts, and other classmates agree. Phillip is concerned about Faith’s description of the teacher, so he uses astral projection to spy on him, and he agrees that Mr. Gessert gives off weird vibes.

Both Faith and Phillip connect with other kids at their schools who have an interest in psychic abilities. Faith meets a boy named Jake, who is intrigued because his father has been reading a book about remote viewing, which is what Faith does. As Phillip becomes friends with Roxanne, who is interested in the topic of astral projection. When Phillip confides in her about his astral projection abilities, she asks him to teach her how to do it.

One day, when Phillip and Roxanne are at the library, they see Mr. Gessert there. Mr. Gessert has an interest in Spanish treasure, and there is a special exhibit at the library with some very valuable pieces. Soon after that, the Spanish treasure is stolen from the library. It doesn’t take a psychic to see that Mr. Gessert, who has already been established as creepy and suspicious, might have a motive to steal it, but he’s not the only suspect. Working separately, with the help of their friends, Phillip and Faith use their special mental abilities to get to the bottom of Mr. Gessert’s secrets.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Themes and Spoilers

There are a lot of metaphysical themes to this story with the kids exploring their psychic abilities. It is revealed that their old family friend, Roger, is a kind of archaeologist/treasure hunter, but he is regarded as unorthodox by his colleagues because he uses his psychic abilities to guide his discoveries. Roger is the one who taught the twins and their older sister how to use their abilities.

In the story, the people who are open to developing their psychic/spiritual/metaphysical sides are the heroes, and they thrive when they connect to other, like-minded people and share what they know with each other, helping each other to develop. However, there are unhealthy forms of spiritual development in the story. Phillip is unnerved about the Wangsleys and their religious group from the beginning because the Wangsleys always act strangely after one of their meetings. Initially, I was concerned that this group might be doing drugs or something like that, but that’s not the case. It’s a little vague exactly what group the Wangsleys are part of, but it seems to be a very conservative Christian group with a cult-like devotion to their leader, and the the Wangsleys have an unhealthy relationship with it.

I don’t think it’s an unhealthy group for being Christian, but it seems like devotion to this particular group encourages overly harsh discipline and emotional manipulation and that Howard and Cynthia’s relationship with each other is troubled because of disagreements about their level of devotion to the group’s standards. I sometimes think that people who don’t have a religion imagine that all Christian groups are like that, but I’ve been to various Christian churches throughout my life, and most are not like this. There are some extreme groups like this, but this is definitely an extreme group. It seems to be an isolated group that isn’t part of a larger denomination. It seems to have just one charismatic leader. I think it’s implied, although not directly stated, that the reason why Howard isn’t spending more money on keeping up his house is that he’s contributing a large portion of his income to this religious group. I’m a little suspicious about the money issue and the long periods that the group’s leader seems to spend in Hawaii, ostensibly on religious business. While it isn’t stated explicitly, and I could be wrong, I think there are some implications about the Hawaii trips and the money of this group that make them seem suspicious.

Besides the metaphysical elements, there are themes of children adjusting to loss and trauma and major life changes with the deaths of the twins’ parents and their adjustments to their new homes. Initially, Faith doesn’t have a very good relationship with her aunt. She’s angry that her aunt didn’t accept her twin brother and sent him into the foster system, and she finds her aunt’s manners cold. She doesn’t trust her aunt enough to ask for the things she needs, even basic clothing, and her aunt gets upset about that. Things improve between them when they learn to communicate more openly with each other. Aunt Linda does care about Faith, but she’s also dealing with her own feelings and uncertainties about raising her niece. She has never married or had children, and while she does want Faith living with her, becoming a single parent is a major adjustment for her.

The Wangsleys are completely unsuitable as guardians for Phillip. They don’t accept his vegetarianism and complain about having to make special things for him. They keep trying to convert him, both to eating meat and to their religious group. I feel like their religious affiliation should have been disclosed from the beginning and that there should have been some discussion between them, Phillip, and Phillip’s caseworker about the differences between their lifestyle and the lifestyle that Phillip is accustomed to living, so they could all reach an understanding about what living together would mean for them before he actually went to life in their house. Phillip does describe some meetings with the Wangsleys and his caseworker during his time with the Wangsleys, where the caseworker tries to mediate circumstances between them and offer suggestions, such as ways they can deal with Phillip’s vegetarianism. Cynthia does make some efforts to accommodate Phillip’s eating habits, but they’re kind of half-hearted, and the Wangsleys absolutely cannot accept that Phillip doesn’t want to join their religious group. They heavily pressure him to convert, and when they discover Phillip’s astral projection activities, they’re convinced that he’s having visions given to him by the devil and demons. They tell Phillip’s caseworker that they want to adopt him, but Phillip finally speaks out about what life with them is really like. In the end, Roger decides that he will take Phillip, and the Wangsleys are forced to relinquish him to his caseworker.

From now on, Phillip will be living with a family friend who understands him and shares his lifestyle, and there are even hints of a possible romance between Roger and Aunt Linda. The hints of romance with Roger and Aunt Linda feel awkward, partly because the kids know that Aunt Linda is about 10 years older than Roger, a significant although not insurmountable age gap. Mostly, it just feels awkward to me because it seemed like there had been a romance relationship between Roger and the twins’ deceased elder sister. Switching attention from the niece to the aunt, even if the niece is now dead, just feels odd. Although, it’s not definite that their relationship will really be romantic. It might just end up being friendly.

The authors, Barthe DeClements and Christopher Greimes, are a mother and son team, and the inspiration for this story came from their own shared interests in psychic phenomena and “nontraditional methods of expanding awareness.”

My Psychic Experiment Story

I remember reading this book when I was a kid, and I was fascinated with the idea of communicating psychically with other people or being able to do astral projection. I don’t really believe in all of the metaphysical ideas that the book presents, but I think most children go through a phase where they’re interested in things like ESP and try to test themselves to see if they can do it. I actually had an English teacher in middle school who tested the whole class for ESP after we read some science fiction or fantasy story, just for fun. I can’t remember which story that was now, although I don’t think it was this one. I think it might have been a story about a typewriter that predicts the future, although I can’t remember the name of that one. I didn’t do very well on most of the tests, although there was one in particular where I did pretty well. After thinking it over for about 30 years, I’ve decided that it wasn’t because I had any significant psychic ability. The one test I did well involved predicting another person’s actions, and I think anybody could do that fairly well if you know something about the other person’s personality. The teacher did say that people do this activity much better if they do it with close friends, implying that friends have a special connection to each other, but I think it’s more the case that friends understand each other’s thinking better.

I can’t remember whether I read this particular book before or after I was tested for ESP, but I think it was after. I still had an interest in the subject, and I remember, one night, I tried my own experiment in astral projection. When I did it, I had a vision of space aliens. It was probably because I was dozing off in bed at night, and I was going through a sci-fi phase at the time, but I got spooked. You see, the punchline to this story is that I grew up in Arizona, and the night of my experiment happened to be the night of the Phoenix Lights. I was so creeped out the next day, when people were talking about UFOs that I stopped the astral projection experiments. Although I’m sure that it was all a coincidence, just a dream brought on by my own fascination with science fiction and space aliens, I decided that, while I was curious about how such things worked, I didn’t really want them to work for me. I might have been a cowardly child with a habit of spooking herself, but I was also a cowardly child who decided that there was no point in continuing to do things that she knew would spook her. I had my fun with that phase, and then it was time to move on to my next obsession.

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Cold Chills

The Twin Connection

Cold Chills by Adam Mills, 1989.

Fourteen-year-old twins Ryan and Chris Taylor are on a ski trip in Colorado with their parents, their eight-year old sister Lucy, and their friend, Billy Maguire. Although Billy is a friend of both of the twins, he’s really closer to Chris because the two of them are interested in sports. Ryan is more of an intellectual than either of them, and they tease him about not being as good at sports as they are. When the three of them get together, Ryan often feels left out, although he argues with them that he can do decently well at physical activities; he just cares more about other things.

The ski resort where they will be staying is called Moosehead Lodge. It used to be a very exclusive resort, but it’s fallen on hard times in recent years. The reason why they’re going there is that the current owner is an old friend of Mr. Taylor’s from college, and he’s asked Mr. Taylor to write a travel article about the lodge for a magazine to attract new customers.

It turns out that Dede and Wendy, two girls who attend the same school as the boys, will also be staying there over winter break. The twins have crushes on the girls, but they’re also at the age where they still think girls are weird or likely to spoil their fun, so they have mixed feelings about the girls joining them on the ski trip. The boys consider trying to avoid the girls for the entire trip and make them wonder what happened to them, but Ryan thinks that sounds like something a little kid would do. Billy says that, if the twins are going to hang around with girls, he wants a girl for himself, too.

When they arrive at the lodge, the girls greet them right away, so the hiding scheme definitely won’t work. The girls are enthusiastic that there will be a lot of fun things for them all to do. The lodge includes several stores for the guests to shop in, which the girls and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor find intriguing. However, the boys think that the lodge looks haunted. With all the old-fashioned furniture and paintings, it reminds them of something from a movie.

At their first ski lesson, Chris brags that he doesn’t really even need lessons because he’s such an athlete. However, skiing doesn’t come as naturally to him as soccer does. In spite of his bragging, he is clumsy at his first attempts. He apologizes to the instructor, saying that he’s just eager to get going because he knows that they’ll only be staying there a short time. The instructor says that he understands but that the instructions he’s giving them are important for keeping them safe while they have fun.

When the boys return to the lodge, Mrs. Taylor is very upset because a pearl necklace that’s a family heirloom is missing! When Mr. Taylor and the boys go to the manager to report the loss of the necklace, they find out that other pieces of jewelry have been stolen from other guests. The manager has hesitated to contact the police about it because he’s been hoping that the jewelry was merely misplaced and would turn up. The lodge is suffering financially, and if they have a bad season, they might have to close down. Mr. Taylor likes the lodge and wants to help his old friend, but the thefts have to be cleared up for the lodge to continue functioning. The twins decide that they’re going to be the ones to find their mother’s necklace, bring the thief to justice, and save the ski lodge!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I liked this book better than the last book I read in the series. It’s more of a mystery than the last one, although there’s still plenty of excitement and adventure. Unlike the other book I read, where the boys know right away who the villains are, in this story, the boys have no idea who the thief is for much of the book. They have to investigate different suspects, and their first suspects turn out to be completely wrong. The boys undertake a deliberate investigation into their suspects, moving from person to person. There are enough potential suspects with apparent odd behavior to keep readers guessing along with the amateur detectives. A skiing accident and a blizzard and avalanche add excitement and adventure to the story.

When the girls argue with the boys about one of their subjects, the boys say that girls would be more likely to fall in love with a jewel thief than to either be a jewel thief or catch one themselves. The kids turn their investigation into a contest, boys against girls, to see which of them can solve the mystery first. The competition between boys and girls gets carried over to the adults, and it even influenced some of my theories about the identity of the jewel thief. Part of what I suspected turned out to be true, but saying what it was would be a spoiler. 

The boys do solve the mystery before the girls, although the solution does disprove some of what the boys said earlier. Considering some of what they said, I would have liked to see more acknowledgement about that, but the book ends a little abruptly after the final solution is revealed. Overall, I liked the story, but I could see some room for improvement in the ending. Although I understand that part of the premise of this series is that the twins can sense each other’s thoughts, that doesn’t really enter into the story, either, which was also a disappointment.

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Dangerous Play

The Twin Connection

Dangerous Play by Adam Mills, 1989.

Thirteen-year-old twins Ryan and Chris Taylor are visiting Kansas State University during homecoming week because their parents used to attend the university, and the boys are looking forward to getting their first look at life on a college campus. They’re also looking forward to the big football game. At least, Chris is looking forward to the game. Ryan isn’t as athletic and doesn’t see the appeal of sports as much as Chris does. Ryan is more studious. However, both of the boys are hoping to meet Trent Dasher, the star quarterback on the Kansas State football team. Chris wants to ask him for sports advice, and Ryan is hoping to get some pictures of him for their school’s newspaper. Meanwhile, their parents are looking forward to reliving their college years. They met in college, and they spent their honeymoon at the same hotel where they are now staying with the boys.

The twins go in search of Trent Dasher. They contacted him before arriving, so he should be expecting them, but they discover that he is missing. When they go to his dorm room, his roommate doesn’t know where he is. Then, the boys overhear a conversation between Coach Butler and Dean Murray in the athletic offices, in which the coach says that Trent has been behaving oddly recently, and now, he can’t find him. The twins ask Trent’s roommate, Danny, for more information about Trent and if he knows anything about where he might be. Danny says that he and Trent don’t really confide in each other. Even though they’re sharing a dorm room, they’re both pretty busy with their own activities. Danny has noticed that Trent has been unusually nervous recently and that he’s missed some classes, which is out of character for him. Danny suggests that they look for Trent at the Wildcats’ Lair, a snack bar in the University Union where Trent likes to hang out.

Before they leave Trent’s dorm room, the boys sneak a look at Trent’s belongings, and they learn a few things about him. Trent has a girlfriend named Jeannie who lives in their town and has written letters to him. He’s also in danger of failing his chemistry class if he doesn’t get some extra help, and if he fails chemistry, he could lose his scholarship. The boys figured that his problems with his classwork and the threat of losing his scholarship are probably what was worrying him so much.

When the boys go to check out the Wildcats’ Lair, they meet a girl who says that she’s Trent’s girlfriend. Unfortunately, she isn’t Jeannie. When the boys address her as Jeannie, assuming that she’s the one who wrote the letters, she says that’s not her and gets angry. The twins are embarrassing, thinking that they might have just accidentally created a new problem for Trent by complicating his love life.

The boys finally locate Trent talking to a tutor called Wilson about getting help to pass his chemistry exam. It seems like the mystery of the missing athlete is over, but then, Wilson tells Trent that the way he “helps” students is by selling them the test answers. Trent gets angry and refuses to cheat. The boys try approaching Trent, but he doesn’t want to talk to them because he has too much on his mind.

The twins are a little offended at being brushed off by Trent since he knew they were coming and had agreed to meet them, but they can also see that Trent is in trouble and could use some help. They decide to go after him, and they hear him talking to someone on the phone about a special “deal.” Since they just heard him turn down an opportunity to cheat by purchasing test answers, what kind of “deal” is he looking into to solve his problems?

The boys follow Trent and see him meeting with Coach Hatfield from Flint Hills University, Kansas State’s rival. It seems that Coach Hatfield has made Trent an offer to come play for their team, or at least, that’s how Trent interpreted his offer. With his scholarship to Kansas State in danger, Trent is considering the possibility of switching schools. However, it turns out that Coach Hatfield wants something very different. He wants to bribe Trent to throw the upcoming homecoming game and make sure his team loses! He says that he’ll make sure that Trent has enough money for his tuition if he does. Trent is appalled and refuses.

The twins continue to follow Trent as he goes to talk to his girlfriend, Cindi, who is the girl they met earlier. She asks him about Jeannie, but Jeannie is just a high school girl from his home town who has an unrequited crush on him. He’s really serious about Cindi. Trent tells Cindi everything about the troubles he’s been having and the unethical offers he’s had. She asks him why he hasn’t gotten help from the legitimate tutors or from his professor, but he says that the chemistry tutor quit and hasn’t been replaced yet and that his professor seems to have a prejudice against athletes. Trent is thinking that maybe he should just quit college and get a construction job so that he and Cindi can get married, but Cindi doesn’t think that’s a good idea.

Even if Cindi can help Trent find a solution to his problems in chemistry, Trent’s football problems are just beginning. He turned down Coach Hatfield’s proposition, but the Flint Hills football team isn’t going to take no for an answer. They’re prepared to use violence to make sure that the upcoming football game goes their way. Chris and Ryan witness some of them kidnapping Trent! They’ve got to get help and prove that Trent is in trouble to save him!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

There wasn’t really much mystery to the story, which was a disappointment to me. The boys figure out where Trent is and directly witness his kidnapping, so there’s nothing really for them to figure out. It’s more about how they manage to rescue him. It’s more of an adventure story than a mystery. Part of the premise of this series is also that the twins have a kind of psychic connection and can sense each other’s thoughts, but that didn’t really enter into this particular story. The resolution of the situation didn’t depend on them having this ability, and for most of the story, the twins just talk to each other openly about everything without a need to communicate anything silently.

Things turn out okay in the end because Trent is able to make it to the football game and help his team win. The book doesn’t mention any of them going to the police about the coach and football team participating in an actual kidnapping, which made me feel a little weird. It’s great that the boys were able to rescue Trent and that he was able to win the football game honestly. Trent never compromises his values, in spite of the pressure he’s experiencing from all sides, and in the end, there’s an honest solution to his problems with his grades, but still, kidnapping is a serious crime, and I thought that there should have been serious consequences to go with it.

As for Trent’s troubles with chemistry, it turns out that his chemistry professor is actually an old friend of the boys’ parents, and he isn’t really against athletes. The only reason why he hasn’t noticed Trent failing and helped him to get the extra tutoring he needs is that, at a large university, classes are made up of hundreds of students, and professors rely on graduate assistants to help manage the grading. The professor doesn’t know that much about how individual students are doing. They mainly help when students approach them for help, which Trent hasn’t done. When the twins explains Trent’s problems to the professor, the professor talks to Trent, telling him that he should have come to him earlier and that he will help him improve his grades, not because he’s a star athlete but because he’s a student in need of help to complete his degree.

Although I wasn’t thrilled by the mystery itself because it wasn’t much of a mystery, there are some interesting points in this story about both prejudices people have about athletes and the system of success/failure at universities. First, the prejudice part is an obvious one. Many people assume that people are either smart and good at studying or that they’re not smart and that’s why they’re mainly good at sports – like life’s options are brain vs. brawn, with no in-between. The twins themselves represent this notion because Ryan is the studious one and Chris is the athletic one. This seems to be how other people think of them and how they think of themselves. 

Ryan in particular has this view. He’s good in school subjects, better than his brother, but not that good at sports and has no interest in sports. Chris is offended that his brother seems to think that his athletic prowess also makes him the dumber twin and that Ryan is often telling him that he needs to read more and study more or he’s not going to make it in college. Chris argues with Ryan and tells him that just because he’s into sports and not as good at studying as Ryan is doesn’t mean that he can’t manage. Ryan is correct that a student athlete can’t just be all about sports and neglect his school work, as Trent’s situation indicates, but he does underrate the athletes’ abilities to manage and think their way through problems. The boys also have some prejudices against girls, with Ryan particularly thinking of cheerleaders as being brainless, but Cindi, who is also a college cheerleader, comes through for them and helps to rescue her boyfriend. I didn’t like the way the boys talked about girls in the story, but Cindi’s role helps to highlight that theme of underestimating people and their abilities.

Success and failure are major themes in the story. Trent is a successful athlete, and generally, a pretty good student, apparently. However, the failure of one single class could endanger his scholarship and end his entire university career. As the chemistry professor points out later, it’s not just a matter of Trent losing his scholarship because of failing that class; this is a class that is required to complete his degree. We don’t actually know what Trent’s major is, but he apparently needs to understand at least some chemistry for it. Failure of this particular class is just not an option. A student whose scholarship was assured or who had other resources for paying for their education could simply retake a failed class and try to pass the next time, but there’s pressure for Trent because he really relies on his scholarship. Without it, there won’t be a next time for him. What the story points out is that it’s not just Trent’s failure but also the system’s failure. Professors with hundreds of students, and also the pressure of having to do their own researching, writing, and publishing on the side, just can’t keep up with every individual student and give them all the support they need. They rely on graduate assistants and tutors to fill in the gaps and provide that support. Trent falls through the cracks because the chemistry tutor left and hasn’t been replaced yet, and he was reluctant to talk to his professor about it. His lesson is one about how the university system functions and his need to go to his professor about his problems to get the help he needs.

It turns out that Trent isn’t the only one whose future hangs by a thread because of one possible failure. The reason why Coach Hatfield and his players are so desperate to win this upcoming football game is that Coach Hatfield will be fired if they don’t. The Flint Hills football players are desperate to save their coach. They see it as loyalty and as avoiding having to get a new coach that they won’t like as well, but that doesn’t justify engaging in a serious crime to accomplish their goals. In real life, they would be endangering their own futures by pulling this kidnapping stunt. The fact that the coach is willing to go along with such a thing may be a sign of why his career has reached this desperate point in the first place. It might not be just that he’s been unable to deliver the football victories that his university wants but that he also engages in reckless, irresponsible, and unethical behavior. At the very least, we know that he is likely to lose his job because his team lost the football game, but I still think that there are serious legal consequences for his actions.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs

The Three Investigators

The Mystery of the Blazing Cliffs by M.V. Carey, 1981.

Jupiter Jones and his friends are helping out at his uncle’s salvage yard when they have a strange encounter with a disagreeable customer and his wife. Mr. Barron is a very demanding customer who throws a fit whenever something goes wrong, blaming other people when he’s at least somewhat at fault for what happens. He gets upset when one of the employees of the salvage yard tells him that they need to move his car because they’re expecting a delivery truck, and his car is in the way where he parked it. Mr. Barron gets angry because he parked his car “perfectly”, and he calls them incompetent for making him move.

The only reason why Mr. Jones puts up with Mr. Barron is that he’s buying a large amount of stuff, and it’s stuff that few other people would want, like a buckboard wagon, an old stove and stovepipes, and a broken butter churn. The weird thing is that Mr. Barron doesn’t seem interested in these things as antique collectibles or unique pieces of vintage decor, which would be what most people would use such things for. (I’m thinking of those restaurants where they have miscellaneous farm implements, wagon wheels, and antique/vintage items on the walls, and I think that’s what they’re thinking about, too.) Mr. Barron actually seems to want to fix them up and use them for their intended purposes.

Mrs. Barron glosses over her husband’s rudeness and talks about her belief in aliens as described by a popular book called They Walk Among Us. This book describes “the time for deliverance”, when our planet will be in danger from some kind of disaster, and aliens from the planet Omega will arrive to rescue people from the human race so our species won’t be lost. Mr. Jones thinks that the Barrons are crazy, but his own wife interrupts the conversation before Mr. Jones can say something that will ruin the sale.

Jupiter is intrigued by these weird people, and he persuades his uncle to let him and his friends go along on the trip to deliver all of the things they bought to their ranch up north. Jupiter’s friends are a little reluctant to see the Barrons again, but Jupiter points out that going on the delivery trip will allow them to also go on a buying trip at the same time, something that his uncle has promised them they can do. Jupiter has been wanting to take charge of a buying trip, but he also wants to learn more about the Barrons.

Before they leave, the boys do some research on Mr. Barron and learn that he came from a wealthy business family in the Midwest. However, he has been in and out of trouble with every business he’s ever run. He did pretty well at first after he inherited his family’s business, which made tractors, but then, workers went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Mr. Barron was forced to give them what they wanted, but he was so angry about the strike and being forced to make concessions that he sold that business and bought a different one. In his next business, he had problems complying with government anti-pollution regulations, so he sold that business and bought another one. In his third business, he was sued for discriminatory hiring processes, so he once again sold out and tried another business.

Since then, he has had a string of different businesses, and each and every time, he ran into some kind of problem with government regulations or labor disputes. Every time he has any kind of problem in business, he immediately quits that type of business entirely rather than sticking to it and working things out. He just can’t accept imperfection in any form, and he defines imperfection as anybody or anything that goes against what he, personally, wants to do, regardless of circumstances. He denies that he could be imperfect himself, that he needs to adjust to new or changing situations, or that he needs to improve in any way, blaming everyone else for all of his problems. Finally, unable to find any business where everything goes absolutely perfectly all the time, where there are no rules or standards to follow other than his own and nobody to check that he’s following them, and where he never gets any form of negative feedback, Mr. Barron decided to sell off his remaining business interests and buy a ranch in California, which is where he is now. He’s planning to use the ranch to experiment with new crops and self-sufficient living.

When the boys arrive at the ranch with one of Mr. Jones’s delivery drivers, Konrad, they realize that the ranch is a kind of commune. The people who work for Mr. Barron and live at the ranch show them around and explain how the ranch has its own power supply and water supply. Elsie, who is the cook at the ranch, tells them that Mr. Barron seems to be preparing for some kind of “revolution”, when there will be some kind of catastrophe and society falls apart. (Remember, for Mr. Barron, society and all other humans besides Mr. Barron are idiots and incompetents, so of course, everything is falling apart.) Most of the people at the ranch don’t really believe that’s going to happen. They’re there mainly because Mr. Barron hired them to work there. However, it seems like the Barrons are deep into this notion of a coming disaster.

Konrad thinks that this ranch is very weird, and he wants to leave, but the boys persuade him that they should accept Mrs. Barron’s invitation to stay for dinner. Konrad chooses to eat with the staff rather than face Mr. Barron again. During dinner, the boys are treated to Mr. Barron’s negative attitude about everything, from his disappointment in his adopted sons (and, by extension, in young people in general) to “the evils of plastic in almost any form”, from synthetic leather to polyester clothing. By contrast, Mrs. Barron is very fond of her adopted sons, one of whom is part of a rock band and the other of whom is a poet who supports himself by making wooden clogs. Mrs. Barron says that the rock drummer son will be coming to the ranch in August for the Blue Light Mission convention, a meeting of other people who also believe in aliens who will save humanity. The author of They Walk Among Us will also be there as a guest speaker. 

Although Mr. Barron seems to have at least some belief in the idea that society is falling apart because of “anarchists and criminals who want to take over”, his criticism of people in general also extends to his wife and the other people who attend these alien conventions and believe in They Walk Among Us. Even though he’s hosting this convention for his wife’s sake, he thinks that the convention attendees are a bunch of kooks and crazies who would victimize his wife if he didn’t keep an eye on her. Basically, both of the Barrons are conspiracy theorists, but they’re not following quite the same conspiracy theories. Mrs. Barron is the more positive and hopeful of the two of them, believing that things will somehow turn out okay when the aliens show up, cheerfully ignoring her husband’s negativity, and continuing to talk about how much she’s looking forward the convention and meeting other, like-minded people. By contrast, Mr. Barron thinks society is just going to fall apart, and it will be everyone for themselves, and that’s about it.

The Three Investigators’ involvement with the Barrons would have ended after their delivery errand and dinner, but when they try to leave the ranch, they are stopped by army officers. The officers tell them that the roads are closed because of orders from Washington. The boys and Konrad are forced to return to the ranch, and Mr. Barron is angry about the roads being closed. The army officers tell Mr. Barron that they are just following orders. They further say that something has happened in Texas, and because of that, there is no electrical power, and the telephones, televisions, and radios aren’t working. Elsie has a battery-operated radio, and she turns it on to find out what’s happening. They hear a speech, apparently from the US President, about unidentified aircraft being seen around Texas, New Mexico, and California and possible landings in those states.

Naturally, when confronted with this serious situation, Mr. Barron is ready to take charge and deal with it in his usual way – by immediately finding someone to blame, dishing out criticism, and calling other people stupid and incompetent. He complains that the President gave a stupid speech that doesn’t provide any useful information and that he can’t understand how this guy ever got elected in the first place. Then, he goes off on a rant against communists and anarchists. (Seriously, that’s how both this book and his thought processes go. In a way, he’s very 2020s, a man decades ahead of his time.) Elsie points out that the people at the ranch are safe, no matter what’s happening, because the ranch is designed to be self-sufficient. Mr. Barron may be an angry mess of paranoia and negativity, but he is thorough and has been planning ahead for disaster this entire time.

The military officers say that the roads are being blocked off to the public so they can be used for military vehicles. Mr. Barron becomes convinced that either some disaster has happened or that the politicians believe that one is imminent. He also thinks that the politicians blocked off the road to the ranch so they can come and shelter at his amazing, self-sufficient ranch themselves. (Once again, everyone else, from the government to the general public, is incompetent, and only Mr. Barron does things right. He further assumes that the rest of the world must somehow secretly know this, quietly envies him, and plots to take advantage of him.) There’s no sign of anyone else arriving, at least not yet, but Mr. Barron, who has a deep disdain for fools of all kinds, doesn’t like the idea of welcoming a bunch of political fools. However, he does show sympathy to the boys and Konrad because he can recognize that nothing that’s happening is their fault. He tells them that they’re welcome to stay at the ranch until this situation, whatever it is, is cleared up.

The Three Investigators decide that they need to find out what’s really happening in the cities outside of this ranch and verify what they’ve been told about the situation because everything was fine when they left home. Since they can’t leave by the road, they do a little scouting around the area to see if there’s a route they can use to walk to another town. Since it’s getting dark, they decide that it would be too dangerous to try hiking and climbing in the area at night. They plan to wait until morning to actually leave, but while they’re looking around, they witness something very strange. They see what looks like blue fire on the cliffs near the ranch and some kind of silver, oval-shaped object in the sky! Have they really witnessed a flying saucer? Is what Mrs. Barron believes about aliens coming to Earth true?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction and Spoilers

I love this Three Investigators mystery because the premise was so unusual! Three Investigators mysteries are often what I call Pseudo-Ghost Stories, like the mysteries in Scooby-Doo because any supernatural inevitably turns out to be faked in some way for some ulterior motive. This also applies to science-fiction other-worldly phenomena, like aliens. The great thing about this book is that the phenomena is so over-the-top that it’s difficult to think of a plausible way that it could be faked or a reasonable reason why someone would even do it. In this case, we know immediately that the boys see what looks like blue flames and a flying saucer, and there are either military personnel or people pretending to be military personnel blocking the roads out of the ranch. This is a plot that would seem to involve some impressive special effects and a significant cast of conspirators, and the purpose behind it doesn’t seem obvious.

Pretty early in the story, I had a couple of theories about who could profit from faking a UFO, but I had doubts about it because of the relatively small audience involved and because it seemed like there would be much easier methods of them accomplishing their goals. It is a pretty over-the-top plot, although it’s partially explained because Mr. Barron is a rather over-the-top figure to target. It is his paranoia and reluctance to call in authorities and outside help with anything that sets him up for this. Mr. Barron’s attitude that anything that contradicts him or his view of anything is inherently wrong cuts him off from the kind of reality checks he needs, even though he understands that his own wife can use some reality checks outside of her group of fellow alien enthusiasts. 

I knew that, for anybody to get the idea of doing this type of hoax and to plant the evidence to create the illusion of alien landings, one or more of the conspirators would have to be directly involved with the ranch. One of them is obvious, when you think about it, because it’s one of the people who directly supplies some of that evidence. Part of the mystery is about who else is involved. I could see multiple ways that could have gone, and I considered different possible masterminds for the scheme and different motives behind it. Most of what I considered turned out to be wrong, although my theory that Mrs. Barron could have engineered the whole thing with the help of her adopted sons and some friends from the alien conventions with the goal of demonstrating to Mr. Barron just how vulnerable his own paranoia and obsession with his personal conspiracy theories has made him would have been fun. Mrs. Barron may be gullible when it comes to her favorite alien conspiracy theory book, but I would have enjoyed a little role reversal, where she turns out to be more clued about human nature than Mr. Barron, who is so self-obsessed and ultra-skeptical about other people, refusing to receive information, advice, or criticism from anyone else, that he routinely fools himself without outside help. 

Alternatively, I though that the Barrons’ sons could have teamed up to pull this off to make both of the Barrons see the folly of their ways. In a way, I think that Mrs. Barron’s belief in the aliens is partly as a remedy to her husband’s relentless negativity. She believes him that disaster is impending because she actually thinks a lot of her husband and trusts his opinion on the way society is going, but being a more hopeful and trusting person, she has latched onto the idea of rescuing aliens because her husband doesn’t believe in fellow humans. Of course, Mr. Barron disdains that theory because he can tell that it comes from fellow human beings, who are all varying degrees of stupid, incompetent, and scheming, but Mrs. Barron clings to it as a hopeful thing that binds her to like-minded people because she needs that sense of hope and connection. At least, that’s how I read the situation. Mrs. Barron believes everything, even things she shouldn’t, and Mr. Barron refuses to believe anything, even things he should. There is a happy medium between believing everything other people say and allowing them to lead you around by the nose and being so paranoid that everyone is either wrong or out to trick you that you refuse to engage with the real world and turn aside legitimate sources of help and outside information. Neither of the Barrons represent that happy medium, and I would have liked the conspiracy to bring that to light. In a way, it does, but that’s not really the main focus. It’s more about taking advantage of the Barrons and their eccentricities.

I also considered the idea that the entire plot could have been a publicity stunt by the author of Mrs. Barron’s favorite book and the convention organizers. I even thought that Mrs. Barron might have been in on it as a true believer, trying to get her husband and others to believe. However, that’s not the case. The book and the convention just supply the inspiration for the conspiracy.

In a way, this story reminds me a little of the Sherlock Holmes story The Red-Headed League, where there’s a seemingly outlandish scheme to cover an ordinary theft. There is a twist to this one because nobody but Mr. Barron knows exactly where the thing they’re trying to steal is. In the end, only Jupiter reasons it out because he has really come to understand the way Mr. Barron’s mind works.

The mystery is intriguing because there are so many possibilities to consider. In a way, I preferred all the possibilities to the eventual resolution of the mystery, but the solution does make sense. It’s still an over-the-top plot that involves a significant number of people, equipment, and special effects, but it does appeal to my inner Scooby-Doo fan, who enjoys a good, complicated scheme and a villain behind the mask.

Posted on by TracyC · 6 Comments

The Case of the Close Encounter

The Bobbsey Twins

#5 The Case of the Close Encounter by Laura Lee Hope (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1988.

Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge Sean Hagins, for supplying me with photos of this book! Usually, I take pictures of books myself, but I just couldn’t find a physical copy of this one. Sean is a big fan of the Bobbsey Twins, particularly the New Bobbsey Twins mysteries, and you can see some of his video reviews as well as videos about his photography work on his YouTube channel, SJHFoto. Thanks, Sean!

When Nan gets sick, her twin brother Bert, agrees to take over her babysitting job, looking after a 5-year-old boy named Artie. Artie has a reputation for being a troublemaker, but since he’s had experience looking after the younger set of twins in the Bobbsey family, Bert figures that he can handle Artie. Of course, Artie turns out to be a handful. Artie tries to paint his cat’s whiskers and juggle eggs, and he generally makes a mess. Then, he suddenly declares that they’re playing hide-and-seek and runs outside. When Bert goes out to look for him, he sees a bright light from the sky, and when he looks up, he sees what looks like a flying saucer!

Artie doesn’t see the flying saucer and thinks that Bert is making it up. Everyone is in bed when Bert gets home, so he phones the police and reports the UFO. He tells the rest of his family about it the next morning. He speaks to the police and a reporter from the newspaper where his mother works, but they all say the same thing: without more witnesses to the event or more information, there’s not much they can do. Since nobody seems to believe him, Bert decides that they only thing to do is to investigate the phenomenon himself.

Bert and his siblings go to the area where Bert saw the UFO to look for clues about what it could have been. Artie tags along, although he’s more of a distraction than a help to them. In a clearing, they find large patches of grass that have been flattened and burnt. They look almost like footprints made by some kind of fiery dinosaur. The kids aren’t sure what to think of them. Then, while walking along the road, they’re almost hit by an angry man on a motor scooter. When they get back to Artie’s house, Artie’s father identifies the man as Felix Usher, who is renting a cottage nearby. There are stories that the house he’s renting used to be used by smugglers and gangsters and that they might have left some kind of treasure behind, but Artie’s father doesn’t really believe that.

On the way home, the Bobbsey twins stop off at a diner called the Flying Saucer Diner. While they’re talking with the owner, they learn that he bought the place from Mr. Stockton, the same man who used to own the house that Felix Usher is renting. When Mr. Stockton owned it, he called it the Cup ‘n’ Saucer Diner, which is the name on an old coffee cup that Artie found in the field with the burn marks. The kids wonder if there could be some kind of connection between the diner and the UFO Bert saw. Then, they find a tape cassette on Bert’s bike seat with a threatening voice on it, telling him that he saw nothing and he should say nothing, or else!

It seems like someone wants Bert to forget what he saw and stop trying to figure out what it was, but that’s just more confirmation that Bert really saw something and that what he saw was significant. What did Bert really see in the sky? Was it really a flying saucer, and were the burn marks really caused by aliens? Or is something else happening in their town?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I liked the premise of this mystery immediately! Unlike many mysteries, it isn’t immediately obvious that a crime has been committed. It falls more under the category of what I call Strange Happenings, where the characters know that something weird is going on, but they’re not entirely sure what it is or why it’s happening.

If I read this one as a kid, I didn’t remember the story, but I had a theory from the beginning about what Bert could have seen because I’ve seen the episode from the old Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew tv series The Creatures that Came on Sunday (older than this book) and an episode of Psych (newer than this book) with a similar premise, that someone had seen an alien spaceship or UFO. I guessed right on the type of flying object Bert saw, but I wasn’t sure what made the burn marks on the ground or how the situation could be related to the old house that might have treasure in it. There is also a woman who comes to see Bert and interview him about what he saw for a book she’s writing, but Bert has the feeling that she isn’t really an author, and she dodges questions that he asks her about her other research into UFOs and the encounters other people have had. There is some doubt from the beginning whether or not Bert’s UFO was an alien spaceship, but the book provides enough doubt and suspects to keep the story interesting as readers speculate about who is playing what roles in the mystery.

This book is from the late 1980s, and there are a couple of dated references to technology and pop culture, although it’s not too bad. It’s enough nostalgia that people who were kids in the 1980s would identify with it, but not too distracting for modern kids to enjoy the story. The kids use a very basic modem to connect to their local newspaper’s archives to do some research. It’s not how the modern World Wide Web works, but Internet use wasn’t popular yet at this time. This is still the early days of civilians having remote access to archives and databases through their computers. There wasn’t much to see, and there weren’t as many people who had the ability to see it yet. There is one instance of someone who seems to be talking to themselves in the story, and then, the kids realize that this person is actually using a radio. The modern equivalent is realizing that someone is actually talking on their cell phone, but cell phones were a relatively new invention around this time. They were expensive, brick-like, and heavy, and very few people had them. A radio or walkie-talkie would have been a more practical choice for this time period. There is also a point where the neighborhood bully and his friend tease Bert about seeing a UFO, and they make some references to popular sci-fi movies, like ET and Planet of the Apes.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Secret of Grey Walls

Lone Pine Series

The Secret of Grey Walls by Malcolm Saville, 1947.

It’s shortly after Christmas, and Petronella (called “Peter” by her friends) is home from boarding school for the holidays. She has a strange dream about running through the woods with an unfamiliar girl and finding a house with gray walls, but she’s not sure where it is or what the dream means. She wakes up when there’s a fire in her dream.

Petronella and her father live by themselves in the countryside because her mother died when she was a baby. Her father misses her when she goes away to school, but he knows that it’s important for her to go, and although he would like to spend all of their holidays together, he also knows that it’s important for her to spend time with her friends.

When Petronella goes to visit her friends, the Mortons, Mr. and Mrs. Morton and their housekeeper, Agnes all receive news that changes the children’s plans for the remainder of their vacation. (This is after Mr. Morton is home from the war after serving in the RAF.) Mr. and Mrs. Morton have to go to London to see a lawyer about some business, although they’re vague about the reasons why. Agnes’s news is that her sister is sick and in the hospital. With all of the adults leaving the Mortons’ house at Witchend, Mr. and Mrs. Morton wonder who they can have looking after David and the twins until they return. They consider different people they can ask, but Agnes says that all of the children can come to the village of Clun with her. Her sister has a very big house, and she’s been worried about not having anyone to look after the house while she’s in the hospital. There will be plenty of room for all of them, and Agnes says that she would appreciate the company in that big, old place. The children can even invite the other members of the Lone Pine Club to join them.

At this point in the series, not all members of the Lone Pine Club have actually met each other. David invited Jon and Penny, a pair of cousins, to join the club while visiting the hotel that Jon’s mother, who is Penny’s aunt, owns in another town. This trip will be an opportunity for the whole club to get together and get to know each other. Jon and Penny are very excited about the trip, especially Penny, who is a talkative girl who enjoys meeting new people.

On the train to meet the others, Penny strikes up a conversation with a man named Alan Denton, who brought a dog onto the train. Denton recently left the Navy and is heading home to manage his family’s sheep farm near Clun. He is very surprised when Penny says that they are also going to Clun because it’s a very small town, and few people visit there during the winter. The old house where they will be staying is usually run as a boarding house for summer visitors, but there won’t be anyone else there during the winter. The old house is called Keep View because it has a view of a crumbling old castle. There isn’t much else left of the castle other than the old keep. The children are fascinated as Denton describes the castle and other points of interest in the area, like a circle of standing stones. He says that visitors sometimes dig for old flint arrowheads.

The other kids are going to Clun by bicycle, except for Peter, who is riding her pony, Sally. Along the way, the kids meet up with a caravan of gypsies they know from a previous book. (Yes, this is a mid-20th century British children’s mystery adventure story, so of course, there are gypsies. The book spells it “gipsies,” and they also call themselves “Romany.” In the case of this series, the Romany are friends of the kids, not suspicious characters, as in many other children’s books from around this time.) The kids tell the Romany where they are heading, and they say that they’ve just left Clun. Ordinarily, they like the area, but there’s been some trouble there lately. Someone is stealing sheep from some of the sheep farms. The Romany know that people are often suspicious of Romany, so they thought that they’d better leave the area before someone accuses them of being involved with the thefts. Before the kids leave the Romany, the Romany remind them about the special whistle that they gave to Peter, saying that if she blows it, any Romany who hears it will come to help.

Peter, meanwhile, has a disturbing encounter on her trip to meet the others. She meets some men whose truck has broken down. The men behave oddly, and although the truck says that it’s a furniture truck, Peter is sure that she hears the baaing of sheep inside.

The kids don’t start to put together pieces of what’s going on until they reunite in Clun. While they are getting to know each other and exploring the area, they suddenly meet up with Alan Denton, who is distraught because his sheep farm has been the latest victim of the sheep thefts. Peter mentions to the others about the strange truck with the sheep sounds, although Denton dismisses the idea that Peter might have encountered the sheep thieves on her way to Clun because he doesn’t think that the thieves would have been able to load all the sheep onto a truck without being noticed.

Meanwhile, a strange man called Mr. Cantor rents a room at Keep View from Agnes. The boarding house doesn’t usually get boarders in the winter, and the children had counted on having the house to themselves during their stay. Mr. Cantor says that he’s recovering from an illness and needs some peace and quiet, which is disappointing to the children because that means that they’ll either have to spend most of their time outside or being very careful not to disturb Mr. Cantor. Although the children like being outdoors, it is cold, and they know they can’t be outdoors all the time, and a houseful of children isn’t usually quiet. Mr. Cantor seems a little strange, and some of the kids get the feeling that he isn’t quite what he seems to be, but he knows a great deal about the history and landmarks of the area. He entertains the children with stories about local history and ancient burials, and they begin feeling better about him.

However, something happens that causes them to becomes suspicious of Mr. Cantor. After a visit to Mr. Denton’s sheep farm, the children get lost. They find a strange grey house and try to ask directions there. Nobody answers their knocks or calls even though the children are sure that someone is watching them from inside the house. Then, they realize that someone is also watching them from the woods. They briefly see this person leaving, and this person has a bicycle that rattles badly. When the children get back to Keep View, they realize that the bicycle they heard belongs to Mr. Cantor because it makes that same distinctive rattle. Was Mr. Cantor spying on them? Who was in the house, and why didn’t they want anyone to see them. Does any of this have something to do with the sheep thefts?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I’m new to this series of mid-20th century British mystery adventure books. This is the first book I’ve read, so I’m really getting to know them as some of them are getting to know each other. I was a little disappointed that this particular book seems to be set after WWII is over because I knew that the series started during the war and that the war was part of the story, but that does put this book contemporary to the time when it was written.

This story and the series in general does have a similar feel to other British children’s mystery adventure stories and series written around the same time, especially the Enid Blyton books, such as Enid Blyton’s Adventure Series and The Famous Five Series. Like the characters in the Enid Blyton books, the members of this friendship club attend boarding schools and have outdoorsy adventures on school holidays. The Romany appearing in this book is also a common element found in Enid Blyton books and other children’s books written around the same time. In all such books, there are stereotypical elements surrounding the Romany characters, although I think the Romany in this book were treated more kindly than the ones in Enid Blyton books. The use of the word “Romany” as well as “gipsy” is one element of understanding, but also the Romany characters in this book are friendly and helpful characters, not suspicious ones. There are people who are suspicious that the Romany are involved in the sheep thefts, but our heroes know that isn’t the case, defend them publicly, and help to expose the real thieves.

I really liked the addition of Mr. Cantor in the story. Like other kids’ mystery books of this type, there is more adventure in the story than mystery, but the appearance of Mr. Cantor adds that needed element of mysterious. For much of the story, it’s difficult to say what Mr. Cantor’s motives are and whose side he’s on. The kids have the feeling from the beginning that he’s not quite what he seems to be, but they find themselves having mixed feelings and debating back-and-forth about him as the story continues. When he’s nice to them and telling them stories about the history of the area, they decide that they like him and that they were silly to be suspicious before. Then, when he seems eager to agree with the authorities that the Romany are responsible for the sheep thefts, they look at him suspiciously again. There are some funny moments when the youngest members of the group, the twins Dickie and Mary, make friends with Mr. Cantor and try to distract him and keep an eye on him while the others do some investigating. The twins are irritated at being left behind by the older kids, but they do throw themselves into the roles of spies and put a lot of effort into making Mr. Cantor their special friend, guilting him into spending time with them. Mary gets Mr. Cantor to entertain them by telling them fairy stories and acts sweetly enthralled, while Mr. Cantor struggles to come up with story ideas to keep the kids happy, and Dickie thinks that the whole thing is stupid and little-kiddish.

I was a little surprised at the way characters in the book talked to each other at times, both children and adults, although I suppose I really shouldn’t have been. They use words that sound rough and insulting, like “stupid” and “ass” in very casual ways, both in describing themselves and each other. I’ve heard that before in British movies and television shows, but it always surprises me because it sounds so ill-mannered. Nobody in the book or in any of the shows I’ve seen seems to mind it, though. It’s just surprising when you hear someone who seems like they’re from the upper classes or who is supposed to have some of the refinements of a boarding school education throwing around words that sound rude and insulting with no thought about it.

There is a foreword at the beginning of the book that says Clun is a real town, but the author took some creative liberties with the landmarks in the story.