The Mysterious Christmas Shell by Eleanor Cameron, 1961.
Tom and Jennifer are visiting their grandmother and their Aunt Vicky and Aunt Melissa Vining in Monterey for Christmas while their parents are in New York, taking care of Aunt Winny, who is sick. However, the children can tell that something is wrong as soon as they arrive because Mrs. Nipper, their aunts’ housekeeper, seems upset, and the house isn’t decorated for Christmas like it usually is. They have a Christmas tree, but there are no ornaments on it yet, and the Christmas greenery hasn’t been laid out.
The children hear their aunts talking about a letter that their father (the children’s grandfather) had written before he died. They know that he wrote the letter, but they’re upset because they can’t find it. The aunts explain to the children that they had to sell Sea Meadows, the wooded lands that they own, to a man called Theodore Bidwell. It’s a deep disappointment because Sea Meadows is full of ancient sequoias, and the children always liked to go camping and exploring there. Originally, Mr. Bidwell told them that we was only planning to put a few houses on that land that wouldn’t require removing many of the old trees, but now, they’ve learned that he’s actually planning on creating a large summer resort town. The aunts are upset that Mr. Bidwell lied to them to get them to sell the property, but there wasn’t much they could do anyway because they badly needed money to settle debts they had after their father died. The saddest part is that the family business has improved since they made the sale, and the aunts could now afford to buy back the property, but Mr. Bidwell refuses to sell it back to them.
There is one thing that might change the situation. Before the aunts’ father died, he discussed changing his will. He decided that, rather than leave that land to them as he originally planned, he wanted to leave it to the state of California to be turned into a state park. He thought it was the best way of ensuring that the natural beauty of the land would be preserved, and his daughters approved. The aunts already had the family business, and they didn’t need the land for their own sake. However, for some reason, his lawyer never got the letter their father said he was going send about the change in his will. The aunts are sure that he actually wrote the letter, but they think it got lost or mislaid instead of being mailed. If the aunts can find the letter that their father wrote, it would prove that the land actually belongs to the state of California and that it was never really theirs to sell. They’d have to refund Mr. Bidwell’s money, but they’re prepared to do that. It’s more important to them that the land would be preserved from development. Even local people have been angry with the family for selling the land to Mr. Bidwell because they don’t want the development, either.
When Tom and Jennifer begin helping with the Christmas decorations, and they start reminiscing about the Christmas before, the last Christmas when their grandfather was alive and he wrote his letter about the land, they remember that their cousin Elsa was also visiting. Elsa is about Jennifer’s age, and she and her parents are living in France now, so she doesn’t come to visit very often. The mention of Elsa makes the aunts remember that there was something that their father wanted to tell them about Elsa. He mentioned a funny thing she did, but then, they were interrupted, and he didn’t finish telling them what it was before he died. Everyone starts to wonder if Elsa may have done something with the important letter, but they can’t ask her because they know that she and her parents are visiting friends somewhere in France for Christmas, and they don’t know where or how to get in touch with them. (This is the 1960s, pre-Internet and pre-cell phones, so there are no methods of communication they can use that are independent of also knowing their physical location. They have to either know the address or phone number of where they are staying, and they don’t.)
The children’s grandmother recalls that Elsa was still with them even after Tom and Jennifer left with their parents, and they talked about Sea Meadows and showed her the deed to the land. Elsa had been helping to put away Christmas decorations at the time, and while the adults were talking, she suddenly started to cry. She had cut her finger on something, but they were never sure how she did that because none of the decorations were broken. Elsa was also upset because she had done two things earlier in the day that had caused trouble: she’d broken a little figurine and she’d forgotten to tell her grandfather about a phone call from a friend. She seemed worried that she had done yet another thing wrong, but her grandfather told her not to worry because troubles come in threes, and if the cut finger is her third trouble, she has nothing more to worry about. However, their grandmother recalls that Elsa didn’t seem reassured by that. Rather than being the third trouble of last Christmas, Elsa’s cut finger is a clue to a bigger problem that Elsa was afraid to admit, and that’s the clue they need to solve the problems of this Christmas.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. There is an earlier book with the same characters, a mystery about a sea monster in the same area of California, called The Terrible Churnadryne, but I haven’t read it and haven’t been able to find a copy.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I read this book years ago, and I remember liking it, but for a long time, I couldn’t remember the details of the story. I only remembered bits and pieces. I didn’t remember that it was a Christmas story, which would have helped. I remembered that a girl did something with an important paper, but until I reread the book, I couldn’t remember why the paper was important. What stayed with me the longest was the solution to the missing letter and the cut on Elsa’s finger. But, because I forgot that this was a Christmas story, I misremembered exactly what Elsa put the letter in.
I also remembered that one of the aunts had a secret hiding place in a cave when she was young, and when they revisit the cave, they find cave drawings done by Native Americans. I also remembered that the cave is dangerous at certain times because the tide comes in. Years ago, Aunt Melissa was almost trapped there because she stayed too long and was caught by the tide. When her father found out, he refused to allow her to go there alone again. Since her mother and sister didn’t like going to the cave at all and she and her sister soon went away to boarding school, she gave up going there entirely for a long time. She was always sad about the loss of her secret hiding place. However, when she returns there as an adult, it contains part of the secret to unraveling what happened to her father’s letter last Christmas.
At one point in the story, Jennifer finds a very distinctive seashell with red and green colors. Everyone is amazed because it’s a court cone, not a shell normally found on the shores of California, and it also doesn’t normally appear in those colors. This is the shell that Jennifer calls the Christmas Shell. This shell doesn’t directly contain the solution to the mystery, but its shape and something Jennifer does with the shell awaken some of Aunt Melissa’s memories. I also remembered that Jennifer was the one who figured out what Elsa did after watching her brother fiddling around with a napkin in a napkin ring.
While I was rereading this book, I was happy to see all the bits and pieces of my memories of this book fall into place alongside the clues to the mystery. Stories with secret hiding places are always fun, and this one has two – Aunt Melissa’s old secret hiding place in the cave and the place where the missing letter is hidden.
There is also a reference in this story to the Elsie Dinsmore books, a children’s series from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
This is the third book I’ve reviewed on the topic of Indian Sign Language, and the reason why I wanted to include this one is that it was part of the list of recommended reading in one of the others, a book that was written much later. I can see why it was recommended. I found the readability of this book to be lower than the later book, but there is information found in this book that isn’t found in the later book.
The introductory notes at the beginning of the book explain a little about the author’s background. He grew up near the Sioux Indian Reservation in the Dakota Territory during the late 1800s, which was where he was first introduced to this form of sign language. He was not Native American himself, but he was later ceremonially adopted into the Sioux tribe. He became a lecturer about American Indian issues, and he discovered that people were very interested in his sign language demonstrations. He wanted to create this book so there would be a readily-available text explaining how the language works. He credits this form of sign language as being “probably the first American language. It is the first an only American universal language. It may be the first universal language produced by any people.” I’m not completely sure that’s true, but the author does have great respect for the beauty and utility of the sign language and the role that it played in Native American history.
The later book had the vocabulary of the sign language organized by topic, but this book (like an earlier one) had it organized in alphabetical sections, like a dictionary. The hand signs are shown in drawings on one side of the page, with lines and arrows to indicate movement where necessary, and written descriptions of the hand signs on the other.
The range of vocabulary is much more broad in this book than in the newer book, and it includes descriptions of more complex words and concepts that can be conveyed by combining some of the signs for simpler words. For example, the word “generous” can be indicated by making the signs for “heart” and “big”, and there is a list of synonyms for words. The book also demonstrates how to form sentences using the vocabulary words.
There are a couple of sections in the back of this book that provide additional information about other forms of communication, pictographs and smoke signals, which is interesting because the later book that I mentioned also made references to these other forms of communication but didn’t really offer details about how they work. This book is very detailed on the subject of pictographs, showing what different ideographs mean and explaining how to tell entire stories with them. It even explains the correlations between sign language and pictography. The book ends with some historical information about this form of sign language and suggestions for a unit about Indian sign language for a boy scout troop meeting, which include a somewhat cheesy play where the boy scouts pretend to be American Indians and use words like “How” and “paleface” with each other. The book seems very good and thorough on the technical explanations of the language, but I suspect it could be a little better on the subject of cultural representation.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man by Donald J. Sobol, 1967, 1982.
The Idaville police department has an excellent record, but that’s because the chief of police’s ten-year-old son is Encyclopedia Brown. People praise Chief Brown, and Chief Brown doesn’t feel like he can admit how much help his son gives him because he doubts anyone would believe him. Encyclopedia himself doesn’t want to admit to other people that he helps his father figure out tough cases because he doesn’t want to seem too different from the others kids at school. However, Encyclopedia also has a detective business, helping the neighborhood kids to solve their problems for only 25 cents a day, plus expenses.
I always liked Encyclopedia Brown books when I was a kid! There are a couple of instances in this book of underage kids smoking, but I’d like to point out that smoking isn’t portrayed as a good think. Bugs is shown smoking in a picture, but he’s a young hoodlum and Encyclopedia’s nemesis, not one of the good guys in the stories. In another case, there’s a kid who smokes coffee grounds with a homemade pipe because he’s too young to buy tobacco. At first, he thinks he’s clever for figuring out how to do that and sneak a smoke without his mother’s knowledge, but it ends up getting him into trouble, and he promises Encyclopedia that he’ll give it up if he helps him out. Encyclopedia doesn’t lecture him, but he does refer to smoking as “burning your lungs”, so it seems that he isn’t in favor of it.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Stories in the Book:
The Case of the Marble Shooter
Algernon Kehoe is a master at marbles, but when he beat Bugs Meany, Bugs took all of his marbles, including his best shooters. Can Encyclopedia get Algernon’s marbles back?
The Case of Bugs Meany, Detective
Bugs Meany resents Encyclopedia for interfering with his schemes, but he can’t fight him directly because Encyclopedia’s detective partner, Sally, is the toughest and most athletic girl in their grade at school, and she’s beaten Bugs in a fight before. However, this time, he thinks he’s come up with a great way to get revenge – turn his gang, the Tigers, into a rival detective agency and beat Encyclopedia at his own game.
Someone steals a violin from the kids’ friend, Mario, and Bugs shows off that he can get it back before Encyclopedia and claim the reward for finding it. Of course, the kids’ first thought is that Bugs stole the violin himself. Can they prove it?
The Case of the Underwater Car
Encyclopedia and some friends want to go camping, and his mother tells him that he ought to ask Benny to go as well. Encyclopedia and the other kids like Benny, but they don’t like to camp with him because he snores badly. Sure enough, that night, Benny snores again, and Encyclopedia and the other boys have trouble getting to sleep. Encyclopedia leaves the tent for awhile and witnesses a bizarre car accident. The car misses a turn in the road, and the driver jumps out, screaming for help. The driver claims that he fell asleep at the wheel and that he woke up just in time to save himself. He says that his back is now badly injured, and he’s making a large claim on his insurance. However, Encyclopedia knows how to prove that the whole accident was staged.
The Case of the Whistling Ghost
A boy named Fabius hires Encyclopedia because he thinks his camera was stolen by a ghost. Fabius likes to study bugs, and he went inside the old, abandoned Morgan house to see if he could find any interesting bugs there. He was about to photograph a spider when a white ghost came down the stairs, making scary noises and an odd whistling sound. Fabius got spooked and ran off, leaving his camera behind. Later, when he got up the nerve to go back for his camera, it was gone.
The Case of the Explorer’s Money
A famous explorer dies, and a large amount of his money disappears. With so many people coming to his estate to attend an auction of the explorer’s belongings, how can Encyclopedia figure out how the thief plans to evade the searches being conducted by the police and get the money out of the estate?
The Case of the Coffee Smoker
A friend of the kids is being blackmailed. Someone is threatening to tell his mother that he’s been secretly smoking coffee grounds (because he’s too young to buy tobacco and thinks he’s found a clever way around the problem). He promises to kick the habit if Encyclopedia can stop the blackmailer. It isn’t hard to figure out who the blackmailer might be, but proving it will take more thought.
The Case of the Chinese Vase
A friend of Encyclopedia’s has a job cutting lawns to earn extra money for his family. While he’s working on a job, someone breaks an expensive vase in his client’s house, and they accuse Encyclopedia’s friend of doing it. Encyclopedia knows that it was actually the daughter of the house who did it, even though he wasn’t in the house at the time himself. How?
The Case of the Blueberry Pies
This year, there’s been a change to the pie-eating contest because local mothers think that the usual eating contest is gross and unhealthy. To make it healthier, they’ve limited the eating portion to two pies and added a race portion to the event. (Because running is a good thing to do immediately after eating two whole pies quickly?) However, one of the contestants seems to win too easily. How did they cheat?
The Case of the Murder Man
Cicero, a boy actor, wants to put on a mystery play with himself as the star as entertainment for an interfaith youth gathering. The problem is that he doesn’t have a good mystery story in mind, and he recruits Encyclopedia to write one that the audience can solve along with the characters.
The Case of the Million Pesos
Encyclopedia’s friend, Tim Gomez, is worried about his uncle, who is in jail in Mexico. He’s a famous baseball player, but he’s been accused of robbing a bank. Tim thinks his uncle was framed by a man named Pedro Morales because the woman he loved married Tim’s uncle instead, and he’s jealous. Tim’s uncle has an abili, but it’s not one that would be easy to prove. Even though the robbery occurred in another country, Tim asks Encyclopedia to consider the problem and see if he can think of something that will help.
Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol, 1963, 1982.
The Idaville police department has an excellent record, but that’s because the chief of police’s ten-year-old son is Encyclopedia Brown. People praise Chief Brown, and Chief Brown doesn’t feel like he can admit how much help his son gives him because he doubts anyone would believe him. Encyclopedia himself doesn’t want to admit to other people that he helps his father figure out tough cases because he doesn’t want to seem too different from the others kids at school. However, Encyclopedia also has a detective business, helping the neighborhood kids to solve their problems for only 25 cents a day, plus expenses.
This is the very first book in the series and introduces the character and how he begins solving mysteries. It also explains how he meets his detective partner Sally Kimball and his neighborhood nemesis Bug Meany, who is the leader of a gang of boys called the Tigers.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
Stories in the Book:
The Case of Natty Nat
In Encyclopedia’ first case ever, he helps his father to find the real criminal in a robbery case.
The Case of the Scattered Cards
Deciding after his first success that he wants to be a detective, Encyclopedia starts his own detective business out of his garage. His first client is a boy named Clarence, whose tent has been stolen by Bug Meany and his gang of friends called the Tigers. This is the first time that Encyclopedia meets Bugs, who becomes his neighborhood nemesis.
The Case of the Civil War Sword
Bugs Meany offers to trade a sword that he says dates from the Civil War and was once owned by Stonewall Jackson to a boy in exchange for his bike. A real antique sword would be world a great deal more than a bike, but Encyclopedia can tell that it’s a fake.
The Case of Merko’s Grandson
Sally Kimball is one of the prettiest and most athletic girls at school, and she’s also one of the smartest. She wants to prove that she’s as smart as any boy and challenges Encyclopedia to a mystery-solving contest. It’s boy against girl, with Bugs Meany and the Tigers surprisingly rallying behind Encyclopedia. (Bugs has reason to resent Sally, who beat him in a fight after he was bullying another kid. He resents her more than he resents Encyclopedia.) Encyclopedia solves the mystery that Sally poses for him, but rather than becoming another nemesis, Sally joins Encyclopedia’s detective agency.
The Case of the Bank Robber
Encyclopedia and Sally go down to the bank to open an account for the earnings from the detective business, and they witness a robbery in progress. They see the robber collide with a blind beggar and run off, but when the police catch up with the robber, he doesn’t have the money from the robbery with him. A visit with the blind beggar settles what happened.
The Case of the Happy Nephew
A man with a criminal history is accused of robbing a shop. He says that he’s innocent because he only just returned from a long car trip, but his small nephew accidentally proves that can’t be true.
The Case of the Diamond Necklace
Chief Brown is embarrassed because a necklace that he was supposed to guard was apparently stolen from an event where it was supposed to be auctioned off. Encyclopedia notices an inconsistency in the witness statement that proves what really happened.
The Case of the Knife in the Watermelon
A member of a local gang of kids broke into the storeroom of a grocery store and tried to rob it. (It’s the Lions this time instead of the Tigers. First, I think it’s funny that they have the same name as a benevolent club, and second, I want to make a joke about how there should be a third gang in their town call the Bears – Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my!) Fortunately, he was frightened away before he took anything, but in his getaway, he accidentally tripped and stabbed a watermelon with his knife, leaving the knife behind. The owner of the grocery store becomes Encyclopedia’s first adult client (other than his father), hiring him to figure out which kid in the gang it was.
The Case of the Missing Roller Skates
Encyclopedia had Sally’s roller skates because he was fixing them for her, but before he can give them back, they’re stolen from the dentist’s office during his appointment. Encyclopedia tracks down the thief!
The Case of the Champion Egg Spinner
A kid has been winning an egg spinning contest against other kids after convincing them to bet some of their prized possessions. The other kids ask Encyclopedia to find out how he’s been winning.
Alvin has been reading a book about spies, and now, he and his best friend, Shoie (a nickname, his real name is Wilfred Shoemaker), are playing at being spies. One day, as the boys are walking home from school, Shoie stops to pick up another bottle top for his collection, and he finds a scrap of paper with a strange message on it. The words in the message don’t make any sense, and it looks like it’s some kind of secret code.
When Alvin gets home, his mother insists that he clean his room before he does anything else. Shoie helps him, and Alvin’s little sister, Daphne, insists that she wants to help, too, because she wants to see what the boys are doing. Daphne is fascinated by the things her older brother does and always wants to be included. When Daphne finds out that they’re being spies and have found a secret message, she also insists that she wants to be a spy and look at the message with them. They let her see the message, but they insist that she can’t be a spy because it’s dangerous and “work for men.” (That attitude comes up in mid-20th century kids’ books, especially ones for boys. I’d just like to point out here that, while dealing with spies would actually be dangerous, too dangerous for a young kid like Daphne, the fact is that both Alvin and Shoie are only twelve years old, so technically, they don’t count as “men”, either.) At first, the kids think maybe the message is meant for a secret Russian spy ring targeting the nearby defense plant. (This book was written during the Cold War, so that would be one of the first possibilities they would consider.)
Alvin comes to the conclusion that they need to investigate Mr. Pinkney, a relative newcomer to their town, because they found the message near his house, the message mentions an oak, and there’s one growing nearby. Alvin also thinks that they might need some help to break the code in the message, so he suggests that they visit Mr. Link, a WWII veteran who was also a spy during the war. He’s now an invalid who has a housekeeper who takes care of him, but he could still advise them about what to do with the mysterious message. Although the boys tell her that she can’t be involved with what they’re doing, Daphne still tags along with them when they go to see Mr. Link.
When the kids ask Mr. Link about his time as a secret agent during the war, he calls spying a “dirty, dirty business” but “something that must be done”, saying that he’s glad that it’s all over now. However, he’s perfectly willing to talk about secret codes and ciphers. Mr. Link has even written a couple of books on the subject. This story is a nice introduction to codes and ciphers for kids because it explains some of the terms and how codes and ciphers work. As Mr. Link points out, much of what people think of as secret codes are actually ciphers. The difference is that ciphers are actually secret alphabets that can be used to compose messages. When Mr. Link asks them if they’re trying to compose a cipher themselves, the kids tell him about the secret message and their suspicions that there could be a spy in their town.
Mr. Link doesn’t reject the possibility that there could be a spy in the area, but he tells them that they’re wrong to suspect Mr. Pinkney of being a spy because Mr. Pinkney is a friend of his, and he knows him very well. For a moment, Alvin wonders if they should suspect Mr. Link too, but Mr. Link anticipates the thought and says that he can prove that he’s trustworthy by telling them more about Mr. Pinkney and breaking the code for them. Mr. Link explains that Mr. Pinkney was lonely when he first came to town, and that’s how the two men started playing chess together regularly. Mr. Pinkney owns a factory that makes electronic devices, like transistor radios and intercoms, and one day, he told Mr. Link that he had a problem with his business. He suspected a business spy of trying to intercept his messages to his product distributors in Europe, and he needed a way to make his messages more secure. Naturally, Mr. Link suggested using a code, and he recognizes the coded message the kids found as one that Herman Pinkney sent to his distributors. Mr. Link shows the kids how each word in the strange message stands for another word or concept. Only someone who knew what the code words were supposed to mean would be able to read it.
Alvin is a bit embarrassed about jumping to the wrong conclusion, and Mr. Link says that he’s learned a couple of important lessons from this experience. First, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions about people if you don’t know them very well, and second, people who are full of tricks and deception are easily confused when they encounter straightforward honesty. In other words, while Alvin was spinning imaginative spy tales in his head, he overlooked the possibility that there could be a more innocent explanation. Alvin is still embarrassed, but he takes the lessons to heart, and Mr. Link tells them more about codes, how they have been used in history, and how codes are around them all the time, every day.
I liked Mr. Link’s explanations about how codes aren’t just for spies. He says that codes are used for all kinds of communications where only certain people are meant to read and understand messages. He explains about the product codes on things that the kids buy and wear everyday, showing them how to read the size codes on their shoes. Codes can indicate where and when products were made, and we still use product codes for that purpose in the 21st century. I used to work in a textbook store, and we used the codes on textbooks to tell which edition of a book students needed or whether a student needed just the textbook or if they needed books that came bundled with other, supplemental materials. Mr. Link says that ordinary people can sometimes figure out what product codes mean by studying them and looking for patterns that they recognize, like dates or sizes.
Since this book was written in the 1960s, they don’t talk about computers or the Internet, but that’s a major use of codes in the 21st century, and anybody can study and learn computer coding. Computer programming involves “coding” because, like with the other codes that Mr. Link describes, programming languages are also codes, using certain words and symbols to represent concepts that not everybody needs to read in order to use a computer, but which the computer can interpret so it knows what the programmer and user want it to do. Communications and transactions over the Internet also involve cryptography to protect the users’ information, using algorithms to convert a sender’s plaintext message to ciphertext to conceal its true meaning from any third party who might try to read the message and then back into plaintext so the intended recipient can read it. Codes really are around us all the time, even when we’re not fully aware of them or paying close attention to them.
The kids are fascinated by Mr. Link’s stories about how codes were used in history and the unusual methods people used to send secret messages, like writing them on someone’s head and then letting their hair grow out and cover it. He also shows them scytales, round pieces of wood that can be used for reading secret messages. The message would be written on a long strip in what appears to be jumbled letters. The message only makes sense when the strip is wrapped around the scytale so that the letters will align in the proper order to be read. That’s what’s shown on the cover of this book, although the picture also shows a message written with code symbols.
It’s all fun and games until a woman named Alicia Fenwick shows up in town with a puzzle that puts the kids’ abilities to the test. She comes to see Alvin’s father in his professional capacity with the police, looking for a man named J. A. Smith. Miss Fenwick explains an incident that happened to her family during the Civil War. The Fenwicks used to own a Southern plantation with slaves. (Daphne says that she doesn’t like the part of the story about the slaves, and Miss Fenwick says she doesn’t either although her great-great grandfather was apparently kind to his … which is what they all say, isn’t it? More about that in my reaction section below.) During the Civil War, her great-great grandfather was an old man. All the young men went away to fight in the war, but he stayed at home. When there were rumors of marauding bandits, he got worried that the plantation with would be a prime target for them with all the young men gone. He enlisted the help of a former slave he had freed before but who was still a friend to help him hide the Fenwick family’s valuables. They put everything they could into a chest and buried it. Unfortunately, when the bandits came, they forced the former slave, Adam Moses, to reveal the location of the chest by threatening to kill his young son. After they dug up the chest, they took Mr. Moses prisoner and forced him to help them take the chest with them further north. Eventually, Mr. Moses escaped from the bandits after they tried to kill him, and he wrote a letter to the Fenwicks saying that he was now in Indiana and that the bandits had forced him to help them rebury the chest. He said that he would try to retrieve the chest and return home with it, but sadly, he was later found murdered close to Riverton, the town where the children now live, probably killed by the same bandits who took the chest. However, the leader of the bandits was also killed shortly after that, so they never enjoyed their ill-gotten gains. The treasure chest was never recovered. The story was passed down in the Fenwick family for generations as an unsolved mystery until recently, when Miss Fenwick received a letter from J. A. Smith asking her for any information she might have about about the treasure. She told this person about the letter from Mr. Moses but didn’t hear from him again, so she’s trying to trace J. A. Smith and find out what he knows about the treasure.
Sergeant Fernald, Alvin’s father, says that there are people in town with the last name of Smith but nobody who has the initials “J. A.”. However, the kids say that Miss Fenwick’s story might explain some of the stories told by local kids about an area outside of town called Treasure Bluffs. Rumor has it that there was a treasure buried there years ago, although nobody knows exactly why or where. The kids start to think that the story really points to the location of the Fenwick treasure, but the bluffs cover a lot of territory, and before they can really search for the treasure, they have to find a way to narrow down the search area.
The kids’ new lessons in code-breaking pay off when they spot a man at the local library using the code books that Mr. Link donated. The strange man is trying to break a message that will reveal the secret hiding place of the Fenwick treasure. Can Alvin and his friends figure out who the man is and break the code themselves before he does?
The book ends with a section explaining more about codes and ciphers. One of the codes they explain is the pigpen cipher, which is a popular one for children and appears in other children’s books. This book says that it was used in the Civil War, which is true, but it’s actually older than that.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
There are some elements in this story about boys thinking that they’re more capable than girls, like in the way that Alvin and Shoie talk to Alvin’s little sister, but Alvin also acknowledge, to his irritation, that sometimes Daphne thinks even faster than he does. When Mr. Link is explaining the size codes on the children’s shoes, 8-year-old Daphne actually catches on a little faster than 12-year-old Alvin and comes up with the answer to a problem Mr. Link poses before Alvin’s “Magnificent Brain” does. I liked that touch of imperfection on Alvin’s part and the acknowledgement of Daphne’s abilities, which help thwart any overconfidence or arrogance that Alvin might have about his “Magnificent Brain.”
I appreciated that, although Alvin is clever, he’s not a complete genius, and he is noticeably fallible. He’s not good at everything, like some heroes of children’s books. He is terrible at spelling, and when he tries to write that he’s a cryptographer, he spells it “criptogruffer,” which doesn’t inspire professional confidence. Daphne knows the correct spelling and spells it aloud for him, much to Alvin’s embarrassment and annoyance. Alvin is still pretty clever, and he breaks the final code that reveals the hiding place of the treasure, but it is nice that he’s not unbelievably perfect.
The final code in the book is easy enough that anybody could actually break it with minimal effort. I spotted it pretty quickly because there’s something that I always do with secret messages in books, and it often pays off. (There are one or two things in the Harry Potter books that this works on as well.) I’m not going to spoil it here, although I’ll give you a hint: When I was a kid, I read and liked a book about Leonardo Da Vinci.
I genuinely enjoyed the parts of the story about codes, which run through most of the book. Mr. Link is full of helpful information, and the section at the back of the book with more information about codes is a nice introduction to some basic types of codes. As I said above, I like the practical applications of the lessons, showing kids how they can read parts of product codes, if they understand what to look for. That’s a useful skill, and you can use similar techniques to interpret the expiration dates on food products when they’re only stamped with a code instead of an explicit date.
Like Daphne, I also didn’t like the part of the story about slaves. This book was written during the Civil Rights Movement, which makes its takes on the Civil War, slaves, and race interesting. The author wants to tell a story that bears on the Civil War, so he has to address this is some fashion, and he tries to get pass the uncomfortable issue of families owning slaves as quickly as he can to get to the adventure part of the story.
The Civil War and its associated legends of battles, ghosts, secret passages, hiding places, hidden treasures, and secret messages are staples of American children’s literature. It’s completely understandable because the Civil War was a major event that shaped life and history in the US, it was a traumatic event whose impact is still felt even into the 21st century, and it gave rise to many stories and legends that have further helped shape our culture. The idea of treasures hidden during the war and later forgotten is a popular trope and so are coded messages that point to secrets from the past. I’ve seen these tropes used in other children’s stories, like The Secret of the Strawbridge Place, The House of Dies Drear, and Mystery of the Secret Dolls, and they’re always fun. However, stories with a Civil War backstory can sometimes feel a little uncomfortable because they’re almost impossible to tell without involving slavery in some way because slavery was at the heart of the war.
When Daphne says that she doesn’t like hearing about slavery and owning slaves, they deal with the issue quickly, with Miss Fenwick saying she doesn’t like it, either, and adding that her great-great grandfather was apparently nice about it, and then continuing with the story. As I said above, yeah, right, that’s what they all say. In stories (and sometimes real life), when there are characters whose families owned slaves and plantations, they almost always add the idea that, while slavery was bad and horrible and slaves were mistreated elsewhere, this particular family was special and treated their slaves with kindness, and it was almost like they were one big, happy family. Yeah, right. To be honest, I probably would have accepted that as a kid and let it pass. As an adult, I’m not letting it pass without at least a few pokes in the side as it goes.
The idea of the grateful slave or ex-slave who loves the family he served has been a trope since the anti-Tom literature of the 1850s. I can’t swear that no slave never felt any kind of affection for members of the family that owned them because human nature is varied and unpredictable, surprising relationships can spring up, and if all else fails, Stockholm Syndrome also exists, so I suppose it could happen, but at the same time, I just don’t buy that whole “slavery is bad, but my family is kind, and our slaves loved us” type of narrative. Even if a given slave-owning family was “above average” in treatment of slaves, that doesn’t mean that they were “good” so much as “less bad” among a group of people perpetrating something bad. The “average” in this situation is so bad that there’s quite a lot above that level that still wouldn’t qualify as good, whether the descendants of slave owners believe those old school textbooks promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (some of which were still in use during the Civil Rights Movement – children are shaped by the things they read and the people who gave them those books, and history is not written by the “winners” but by the people who write) or have really thought this through all the way or not. (You don’t have to take my word for it. You can hear about it from people who actually were slaves.) I suppose I can suspend my disbelief about this fictional family for the sake of this kids’ story, which is mostly about secret codes and a treasure hunt and spends little time on racial issues, but I’d just like to point out that I definitely do have a sense of disbelief about this that requires suspension.
Of course, I can see why the author had to include it. In order for us to be invested in the treasure hunt and care about the Fenwick family getting their fortune back, we have to believe that they’re great people, sort of removed or distanced from the responsibility for choosing to own slaves (“in those days, it was accepted throughout the South” is the only explanation we’re given), who were as kind to their slaves as possible, so kind that at least one loved them so much that he gave his life attempting to recover the family fortune, and that they will now use the treasure for some beneficial purpose. (We are told that the family now operates an orphanage, which badly needs money, although we’re also told that one of their former charges has since become a US Senator, so you’d think he could help raise some.) If we didn’t like this family at all, we might see the fortune that came from their plantation as the ill-gotten goods of exploiting someone else’s labor, its loss as poetic justice, and the profit from its recovery as probably something that should either go toward the slaves who did the work on the plantation or maybe some public cause, like a museum or something.
We are told that Adam Moses’s son survived the experience with the bandits, escaped from them when his father was captured, and was adopted by another family, but we are not told anything further about his descendants. While I was reading the book, I halfway wondered if a descendant of the Moses family would surface with some important clue to the situation and get some acknowledgement, but that doesn’t happen. Instead, there’s a person who’s related to one of the bandits, who thinks that he has a right to the treasure because his ancestor stole it from someone else. The characters in the story scoff at that logic, but when I consider the full context of the situation, it makes me think.
The Case of the Painted Dragon by by George Wyatt (Charles Spain Verral), 1961.
Jimmy and Brains are on their way to school when a strange man in a car stops and asks them if they know where he can find a Japanese kid. (He uses the derogatory terms “Jap” and “Nip”, and Brains disapproves. Also, the man is very unspecific about which kid he’s looking for. He offers no names, just that he’s looking for a Japanese boy about their age The town where the boys live is a fairly small college town, so I guess it’s supposed to be reasonable that there would only be one boy matching that description. I grew up in a larger university town, so the idea of there being only one person who could match any description and just expecting random people to know who it is seems really odd to me.) Brains just says that they don’t know anybody with Japanese ancestry, and the man drives away.
After the man leaves, the boy talk about how suspicious he was. They really don’t know who he could be looking for. The last Japanese family to live in their town was the Yamadas, but Mrs. and Mrs. Yamada were killed in a car accident the year before. (It was a point in the book’s favor that Brains doesn’t like derogatory racial terms, but the point is lost quickly when Jimmy is describing Mr. Yamada, who taught art at the boys’ school, and he says that Mr. Yamada “wasn’t one of those ‘inscrutable orientals’ you’re always reading about.” He says that Mr. Yamada was friendly and also coached the school’s swimming team. It’s nice that Jimmy liked Mr. Yamada, but the way he says it sounds a little back-handed. I suppose it’s a sign of the times when this book was written that the author thought it was reasonable for people, even kids, to “always” be reading about “inscrutable orientals”, but on the other hand, I’ve read other books from this time period and earlier that weren’t like that, so I’m inclined to think that it’s not really “always” and everyone.) However, the boys don’t remember the Yamadas having a son their age, so they doubt there’s a connection. They’re concerned because they think that the suspicious stranger might have bad intentions toward the kid he’s looking for.
After the boys get to school, Jimmy sees that stranger driving by the school, and he gets worried. Either the stranger is still looking for the Japanese boy, or he’s looking for Brains and Jimmy. Brains thinks that the best thing to do is try to find the Japanese boy before the man does. However, Brains doesn’t want to tell their principal or teacher about the stranger or the boy. Jimmy worries that maybe the stranger made up the Japanese boy as an excuse to get to him and Brain, and he decides to tell the principal about the stranger in the car, and the principal goes outside and demands that the stranger tell him who he is and what he’s doing, hanging around the school and scaring the students. Unfortunately, he confronts the wrong person in the wrong car, which is an embarrassing situation. (He did the right thing even if he confronted the wrong person. I give him credit for that, but they need to have a reason why the school authorities don’t do anything about the weirdo scouting the students.)
In the boys’ next class, they meet a new student, Mikko, who may be the Japanese boy that the stranger was looking for. The boys make friends with Mikko, inviting him to come to baseball practice with them. They want to warn him about the stranger, but before they talk to him about thr man who seems to be looking for him, they spot the car following them again. Mikko spots the car, too, and the boys ask him if he knows the driver. Mikko says, no, the man is a stranger. Aside from the people at school, the only people Mikko knows in town are Mr. and Mrs. Bevans, the people he’s staying with. Brains makes up a story about why the man might be following them because he doesn’t want to alarm Mikko too much and also because he doesn’t want anybody calling the police until he and Jimmy have had a chance to investigate the situation themselves. (This is a selfish move – Brains just wants a case to investigate, and he doesn’t want to share the case with the proper authorities. But, again, the story needs to provide a reason for Brains and Jimmy to handle the investigation without adult help.)
Jimmy’s mother knows about Mikko’s background and tells him about it when he gets home. It turns out that Mikko is the Yamadas’ son, but until recently, he had been living with relatives in Japan. Mr. Yamada was born in the US, but he worked in Army Intelligence during WWII, which is when he went to Japan and met his wife. Mikko had been born in Japan and was going to school there, but the Yamadas planned to move to the US permanently. Mr. and Mrs. Yamada had come first to get established, but they died in the car accident before they could bring Mikko to join them in the US. However, Mr. Yamada had wanted his son to become an American citizen, like him, and get an American education. The Yamadas had boarded with Mr. and Mrs. Bevans and became friends with them. The Bevanses’ have no children of their own, and they are considering adopting Mikko and giving him the American life that his father wanted him to have.
There is one adult who knows about the mysterious car following Mikko: Yama, an old family servant who accompanied Mikko from Japan to the US to make sure that he gets settled in his new home. Yama is a former sumo wrestler and a formidable man, and when Mikko tells him about the mysterious stranger in the black car, Yama says that he will protect him. However, when the Bevanses’ house is ransacked while the boys are playing baseball and they return and find Yama looking around Mikko’s room, they boys start to suspect that Yama may be involved with the mysterious stranger in some way. At least, he seems to know more than he wants to say about the situation because he refuses to call the police to report the ransacking.
After some further research, Brains and Jimmy learn that the Yamadas’ car accident might not have entirely been an accident, and Brains suspects that everything that has happened may relate somehow to Mr. Yamada’s former work in Army Intelligence.
My Reaction
This is the last book in the Brain Benton series, but it’s also more of a mystery than the previous books. In most of the books, it doesn’t take the boys long to realize who the villains are, and the mystery is more about how they’re going to prove it and stop the bad guys. However, in this book, Brains and Jimmy really do start off completely in the dark. First, they have to learn who the Japanese boy is that the strange man is looking for, and then, they have to learn the history of Mikko and his family. Brains and Jimmy do genuine investigative work, starting with old newspaper stories about the accident that killed Mikko’s parents. Little by little, they begin to reconstruct the past and learn why someone is looking for Mikko and what Mikko has that they want. Even when the boys know who the bad guys are and what they’re after, there is still the puzzle of where Mikko’s father hid it before he died.
I enjoyed the mystery in the book, but I didn’t like some of the ways Jimmy talked about Japanese people. I think it was good that he noted that derogatory terms are inappropriate, and I appreciated that he liked Mikko pretty quickly and pointed out good things about him. Those are good points. It’s just that, sometimes, even when Jimmy speaks favorable about some of the Japanese people in the story, it comes off sounding a little back-handed, like when he says that Mr. Yamada was actually a really nice and friendly guy and not “inscrutable” like characters Jimmy has heard about. I can see that it’s a positive point that someone who has been given a negative impression about certain types of people can consciously notice that the reality is both different and better than what he’s heard before. I think Jimmy is moving in a good direction in his attitudes. It’s just that compliments sound flat when they’re accompanied by a negative or implied negative. It’s like the difference between saying “He’s a really nice guy” vs. “He’s a really nice guy for being the kind of person I’ve always heard was really sinister.” It just adds an uncomfortable twist on the sentiment. I know that the reason Jimmy talks like this is because this book was written during the 1960s, when racial attitudes were changing, and the author probably felt like it was necessary to acknowledge old stereotypes, but I still don’t like it.
The Case of the Waltzing Mouse by by George Wyatt (Charles Spain Verral), 1961.
The Crestwood Garden Club holds an animal show to raise money for their Community Camp Fund. Brains and Jimmy enjoy seeing all of Professor Gustave’s animals, but they become concerned when a seal knocks over a creel where its fish are stored, and they see that there is a large amount of cash concealed inside. Professor Gustave says that he carries that much cash with him because he is always traveling from town to town with his animal show and can’t depend on a single bank for his money.
Brains still seems concerned about the money and the way it’s concealed, but Jimmy is hoping that Brains won’t find a mystery that will disrupt their vacation plans. Every year, they spend a few weeks at a lakeside cabin that their families rent, and all Jimmy wants to do is go swimming and fishing.
However, while Jimmy’s older sister, Ann, is driving the boys to the cabin, they come upon the professor’s trailer of animals. The animals are very upset, and the professor is nowhere to be seen. After searching the area, they find the professor, and he tells them that he was attacked by a couple of men. One of them is a guy called Blackie, who used to work for the professor, but the professor fired him because he mistreated the animals. The men were trying to take the creel with the money in it, but the professor threw it into the bushes, and they didn’t find it.
It turns out that the professor is also going to be staying at a cabin by the lake for awhile. They help him to get settled there with his animals, but Brains is still concerned that the men will be back for the professor’s money. The concern is justified because the men later attack the professor while he’s in a boat on the lake, and the creel is lost overboard. The professor is very upset, not just because the money is now at the bottom of the lake but because the money actually doesn’t belong to him. The professor says that it really belongs to someone else, although he doesn’t say who.
Brains realizes that they can get the creel back because a policeman friend of theirs is also staying at the lake and has offered to teach the boys how to skin dive. Jimmy has wanted to learn to dive and is willing to dive for the creel. Unfortunately, the situation is complicated when the men kidnap the professor for ransom, saying that they’ll let him go if the boys bring them the money.
My Reaction
There were parts of this book that I didn’t really care for. I’ve noticed that the Brains Benton books sometimes include stereotypical attitudes of boys looking down on girls or discounting their abilities. Near the beginning of the book, Jimmy’s sister Ann is trying to get the boys to hurry getting ready to go to the cabin, but Brains wants some extra time to take care of a new device that he’s just gotten. Jimmy says, “But, after all, she is a girl, and girls and women just don’t understand how it is when a fellow gets interested in something highly scientific and technical.” No, Jimmy, I don’t think that’s the issue. It’s not about not understanding how someone can find science interesting; Ann’s just in a hurry to get going. She would probably be just an impatient if you were taking extra time to pick out a different shirt or get your hair combed just right. Granted, some of Jimmy’s comments are tongue-in-cheek. When Ann later tells them to stay out of trouble because she knows that they’ve gotten into trouble with their detective business before, Jimmy mentally lists the dangerous situations they’ve been in while denying that they were really that bad. “Women! Always exaggerating!”
The mystery wasn’t too bad. We do know who the villain is from the beginning, so like the other books that I’ve read in this series, it’s more of a “howdunit” than a “whodunit.” Readers get to watch Brains and Jimmy figure out how to rescue the professor and save his money. There is one other element of the story that is more of a mystery than the professor’s kidnapping. The professor says that the money isn’t really his, and the boys see a mysterious girl talking to Blackie. Is she the one who really owns the money, and if so, what is the relationship between her and the professor?
The Case of the Roving Rolls by George Wyatt (Charles Spain Verral), 1961.
Summer has been dull, with no mysteries to solve. Jimmy doesn’t mind too much because he has other things to do, but his friend and partner in their detective agency, “Brains” Benton, is going a little stir-crazy. When they started their detective agency, they named it the Benton and Carson International Detective Agency, but so far, they’ve only solved local cases. Brains wants to find an international case to solve to justify the name. The opportunity comes when Jimmy gets a letter from his Uncle Ed, who has been living overseas.
Uncle Ed is a pilot who has been living in a fictional Middle-Eastern country called Kassabeba. In his letter, he mentions that something strange has been happening there recently, although he finds it hard to explain exactly what’s been happening. He says that, soon, the answer may be coming to the boys’ town of Crestwood, if it’s not there already. The Emir who ruled the country died under somewhat suspicious circumstances, and his half brother took over from him, but the Emir also had a son who was attending Eton at the time his father died. Apparently, the Emir’s half brother has been doing everything he can to prevent this young prince from coming home to challenge his rule of their country. Uncle Ed and some others who were friendly with the former Emir and like his son, Prince Halam, have been trying to help him, although it’s not going very well. The half brother hasn’t been coronated as the new Emir yet, but the prince’s supporters doubt they can get the prince back home before that happens in another month. Instead, they’ve decided to send the prince to Crestwood College, where Brains’s parents are teachers, seeing it as a quieter, safer place for him to finish his education. The prince’s supporters are hoping that he’ll have another chance at ruling his country when his education is complete. Unfortunately, Uncle Ed has just received word that the half brother has sent a couple of his associates to the US. It’s possible that he’s discovered where the prince is going, and his associates may be heading to Crestwood to harm the prince. Uncle Ed describes these two associates – Jujab, who is short and round with a moon-shaped face, and “the Duke”, who is tall and lanky with a horse face and claims to be British.
The prospect of helping to protect a prince from another country is exciting, and Brains has a thought about the first thing they should do. He says that, if people are coming to Crestwood from another country, probably one of the first things they would do is try to connect with someone else from their own country who is already living in Crestwood because they could use some help and support. Crestwood isn’t a big city, and there is only one other person from Kassabeba already living there, a man named Khouri who works as a cook for a wealthy woman in town. Jimmy is afraid of the cook because he’s a temperamental man, and he had a bad run-in with him at Mrs. Willoughby’s mansion. Jimmy’s been doing a little work there because Mrs. Willoughby hired him to make some shelves for a gardening show, and the cook flew into a rage at him for coming into the kitchen. However, Brains thinks it’s important that they find out if Jujab and the Duke have been to see the cook.
When Jimmy is on his way to the Willoughby estate to meet Brains there after his paper route, he is almost hit by Mrs. Willoughby’s Rolls-Royce … but there’s nobody driving it! Yet, somebody must be controlling it somehow because the car deliberately swerved toward Jimmy and then made a turn in the road. Just after the Rolls-Royce almost hits Jimmy, Mrs. Willoughby’s British butler and chauffeur, Frothingham, comes along on a bicycle, in pursuit of the car. He falls off the bike, and Jimmy helps him. Frothingham explains that he’s got to catch up to the car. He says that it was parked in the Willoughby driveway and that the hand brake was set, and he can’t understand what happened. When Jimmy says that maybe the brake just failed, Frothingham says that he doesn’t think it’s likely because it’s a good quality car and well-maintained. When Brains comes along, Jimmy explains the situation to him, and the two of them follow Frothingham to where he has found the Rolls-Royce parked and apparently undamaged.
Frothingham says that he still can’t imagine who was driving the car and just abandoned it, and Jimmy is still sure that he didn’t see anyone behind the wheel. Brains says that he has an idea about it but that this strange occurrence is a sign that something more serious is about to happen. When Frothingham asks him what he means by that, Brains asks him if he’s seen any unusual strangers around the Willoughby estate recently. Frothingham says that he hasn’t, but Brains is still convinced that the people who are after the prince have been around the Willoughby estate already and that there may be something important hidden in the car.
When the boys later see the Rolls-Royce strike a pedestrian, Frothingham is blamed. The boys are sure that he’s innocent, but they didn’t see who was driving the car, so they can’t swear to it. The boys struggle to clear Frothingham’s name.
My Reaction and Spoilers
I liked this story in the series better than the last one that I read because I felt like there was more intrigue and uncertainty. We do have two specific villains that Brains and Jimmy are looking for from the beginning – the men known as Jujab and the Duke. The characters have descriptions of them, and they know that these men pose a threat to the young prince who will be arriving soon. That means that these people haven’t actually done anything yet, but Brains and Jimmy want to find them before they do.
The incidents with the car are odd and seem like they might be unrelated at first, but they are actually part of the villains’ plot. When Frothingham was first introduced, I was suspicious of him because he seems to be British, but the man known as the Duke is known for posing as a British person. Although the characters in the story seem to have known and liked Frothingham for some time, it occurred to me that he could have been planted in Crestwood for longer than Jimmy’s uncle thought. However, that’s not the case. (Spoiler!) Frothingham is just exactly what he seems to be, an innocent man working for a wealthy local woman. In order for Jujab and the Duke to accomplish their mission, they have to establish some kind of identity for themselves in Crestwood. By making it seem like Frothingham committed a hit-and-run, they get his drivers’ license temporarily revoked so that the man known as the Duke can get hired as a temporary chauffeur for Mrs. Willoughby. Mrs. Willoughby is the one who’s going to meet the young prince when he arrives, so her chauffeur is in a perfect position for some foul play.
The boys have all the information they need to figure this out about halfway through the book, but what makes this book intriguing is that there’s more going on than just the evil half-uncle’s associates trying to get to the prince. When the prince actually arrives, the boys ask him what happens at a coronation ceremony in his country. (This is part of why the prince comes from a fictional country. Not only does the author not have to account for real people and events in a real country, but he can also make up any customs he wants for this country.) The prince describes the ceremony, including a part where the new Emir drinks spring water called the “Water of Life” from a special Golden Vial that has been used for the purpose for generations. The ceremony cannot take place without this Golden Vial, and Brains realizes that, although the prince believes that the vial is back in his home country with his half-uncle, it has actually been transported to the US. It turns out that Mrs. Willoughby’s car was originally owned by the prince’s father and that he left it to her because she was a friend of his and had admired it … and maybe because he hoped that his son would also go to her and retrieve the Golden Vial from the car. The half-uncle’s associates are not just in the US to find the prince but to retrieve this Golden Vial because, without it, the half-uncle cannot be coronated at all.
One other point I thought I would mention is that, when Jimmy first saw the car and didn’t see a driver, I thought that, for some reason, the villains installed a remote control device in the car. This book was written a few years before remote controlled cars were first sold, but with Brains interested in new inventions, it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. However, that’s not the case with this story. The car does have a driver; it’s just that he’s crouched down so he can’t be seen as well. Science and invention enter the story when they realize that they can find the Golden Vial with a Geiger counter because it contains a special stone that contains radioactive material.
The Case of the Counterfeit Coin by George Wyatt (Charles Spain Verral), 1960.
One Saturday, Jimmy Carson is going around, collecting fees from customers on his paper route, when he decides to stop for a soda. To his surprise, he discovers that one of the coins he has received from a customer turns out to be something very unusual. It appears to be from a foreign country, although Jimmy doesn’t recognize what country it’s from. When someone suggests that it could be a rare and valuable coin, Jimmy decides to call his friend and detective partner Brains Benton and ask him what he thinks about it. However, as Jimmy is talking to Brains at a public pay phone, someone tries to reach into the phone booth to grab the coin! Luckily, Jimmy notices in time and yells, and the person doesn’t succeed in getting the coin. Jimmy isn’t able to see the person’s face, but he gets a good look at their hand, the person’s hand has an odd, blackened thumbnail.
It seems that the coin has greater significance for someone than just an odd foreign coin that they accidentally spent instead of American money. When Brains looks at the coin, he identifies it as an ancient Athenian coin, but he also notices that someone has used modern implements on the coin and a varnish to make it look older than it really is. In other words, the coin might at first look like a collector’s coin, but it’s actually a fake. So, if the coin is fake, where did come from, and who wants it so badly?
The boys start going over Jimmy’s route to try to figure out where the coin came from and if any of Jimmy’s customers have a blackened thumbnail. It turns out that the coin came from Binky Barnes’s house. Binky is about their age, but the boys consider him to be a nuisance because he has a way of exaggerating things and is always telling tall tales. You can’t believe a lot of things that Binky says, but the coin apparently came from Binky’s coin collection. It was a new acquisition, and his mother was the one who accidentally gave it to Jimmy when paying him for their news delivery. That still doesn’t explain who was trying to steal it from Jimmy.
Binky is upset when the boys tell him that his coin is a fake, but they point out that he’s legally entitled to get his money back from the person who sold it to him. Binky says that he bought the coin at an old junk shop owned by a man named Silas Gorme. When the boys go to the shop with Binky, they discover that Silas Gorme is the man with the blackened thumbnail who tried to steal the coin from Jimmy!
Silas Gorme is quick to offer Binky a refund in exchange for getting the coin back, but Brains confronts him about how he tried to steal the coin from Jimmy earlier and demands to know where the coin came from. Gorme finally agrees to take the boys to the coin dealer he purchased the coin from, Jeremy Dexter. Gorme tells Dexter that he wants his money back because the coin is fake, but Dexter denies selling him a fake coin. When Dexter examines the coin, he confirms that it’s fake and that it looks like the coin he sold Gorme, but he insists that the coin he sold was authentic.
During the conversation with Dexter, it is revealed that Gorme sold the coin to Binky for less than he paid when it bought it from Dexter, which looks suspicious. Then, they find the tools used for creating the fake coin in Dexter’s shop, which also looks suspicious. Dexter denies that those tools belong to him, but the situation has now become a police matter. Brains is sure that Gorme planted the tools in Dexter’s shop to frame him, and Jimmy is concerned that Dexter is in trouble because of them. Can the boys figure out what Gorme’s game really is and prove it?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction and Spoilers
This story has the trope of a tomboy girl who is mistaken for a boy. Jeremy Dexter has a daughter called Terry. Terry is one of those neutral names that can be nicknames for other, longer names. In this case, Terry is short for Theresa. When the boys first meet her, she’s dressed in clothes that a boy might wear and a baseball cap, and when she gets mad at the boys for getting her father into trouble with the police, she tries to hit Brains and accidentally hits Jimmy. At first, Jimmy is ready to get into a fight with Terry, thinking that Terry is another boy, but Brains stops him and points out that Terry is actually a girl. Traditionally, it isn’t considered acceptable for a boy to hit or get into a fight with a girl, so Jimmy would look bad for hitting Terry back, even though she struck first. The whole situation is something of an old-fashioned trope that’s partly there to show how bright Brains is for noticing something that Jimmy didn’t.
Terry is also a Scrappy-Doo-like character, picking fights to prove she’s tough and charging in when she’s not supposed to, messing things up. Brains and Jimmy find her annoying because of that, and frankly, so did I. A tough and intelligent girl is good and could be a real help to the boys as well as being a client, but Terry’s a thoughtless, put-up-your-dukes kind of character and doesn’t really add anything to the plot besides comic relief. Really, it’s odd for her to be the kind of character who sees fist fighting as her first resort because her father is such a gentle, intellectual type. I just don’t see the point in it.
The mystery itself seems pretty obvious. Considering that only Dexter, the boys, and Gorme are present in Dexter shop when the counterfeiting tools are discovered, it seems pretty obvious who planted them. This is one of those books where there’s less emphasis on whodunit than how they’re going to prove it. I’m not that big on most howdunit style stories, but this one does have a bit of a twist because the boy discover that Gorme is really only the tip of the iceberg. He’s not just an unethical shopkeeper selling one duplicate coin so he can sell his antique coin and have it, too. I turns out that he’s just one member of a larger counterfeiting ring, and the others aren’t happy with him for drawing attention to their activities. Brains and Jimmy infiltrate the gang’s hideout to get the proof that they need to prove what’s really going on to the authorities.
When the story begins, in 1912, the four Linnet children are in a bad situation. With their father on his way to serve in the army in India with a stop in Egypt, they have been left behind to stay with their grandmother, who is not an indulgent, “grandmotherly” sort of grandmother. First, she’s planning to give away the children’s dog because she doesn’t like dogs. Then, she’s planning to send the two eldest children, Robert and Nan (short for Anna), to boarding school, while keeping the younger children, Betsy and Timothy, to be tutored at home. Worse, she locks the children up by themselves, sometimes in the dark, leaving them to scream.
Admittedly, the reason why they were locked up was because their grandmother had arranged a tea party to show them off to her friends, and the children, not liking parties, had barricaded themselves in a hen house, fighting off the gardener and their grandmother’s companion with rhubarb stalks until they were finally caught. They were locked away from the party guests until they were ready to apologize, which none of them want to do. (Bad strategy on the part of the adults. Some things are their own punishment. Rather than locking the children up, which is cruel, they should have let the children suffer the consequences of their own bad choice. Don’t get them out of the hen house; insist that they stay out there, not being allowed any of the goodies at the party or even being allowed back into the house until they first clean themselves up in the yard. The kids aren’t very good at planning, and I’m sure they don’t have food stores in the hen house. Everyone gets hungry eventually, and it should be clear to the children that it’s their personal choice how long they want to stay that way. But, the grandmother also shouldn’t give away the children’s dog without their consent, so it’s hard to feel too sympathetic here.) Realistically, it is acknowledged that their grandmother could be quite kind with children who were gentle, quiet, and well-behaved, but also realistically, this is not the case with her grandchildren. Frankly, the children are wild and have no inclination to compromise with their grandmother. With all of these things combined, it is clear that life with their grandmother is going to be impossible, and Robert decides that there’s only one thing to do: escape.
Robert manages to break out of the room where he’s been locked up, and he frees his siblings and their dog, Absolom. The four children set off with their dog, intending to walk to the mountains (just some mountains, somewhere to the west – nowhere specific and no real plan involved) and make their living there because Robert imagines that would be a good idea. As they pass an inn, they spot a pony and cart tied up outside, and they decide to appropriate them for some transportation. Besides, Robert has always wanted a pony. Nan is concerned that they’re stealing, but Robert says that they’re just “borrowing.”
The Linnet children have much more in common with their Uncle Ambrose than with their grandmother or other relatives. Uncle Ambrose is similarly unsociable and impatient. Uncle Ambrose was once a teacher, but now that he’s retired, he has no desire to spend time with children again. He also doesn’t like dogs. But, it turns out that the pony they “borrowed” belongs to him and takes them to his house. When Uncle Ambrose realizes who the children are, he takes them into his house and keeps them over night, although he doesn’t introduce himself to them immediately. The children feel much more at home with Uncle Ambrose, even when they don’t know who he is, because his house is a bit shabby and untidy, and he has a pet owl and a cat with kittens. Also, in spite of his gruff manner and assertion that he’s not happy about having children around, Nan has the sense that he actually likes them. The children decide that they’re going to try to behave themselves in this house because they like being there and want to stay.
In the morning, Uncle Ambrose goes to town to get the groceries that his peg-legged gardener, Ezra, neglected to get the other day when the children stole the pony and cart in town. When he returns, he also has the children’s luggage with him. Uncle Ambrose went to see his mother about the children, and when he suggested that he could keep them at his house, the children’s grandmother eagerly took him up on the offer. The children are all intensely relieved that they won’t be sent back to their strict grandmother and her overly-tidy house and can stay with their eccentric uncle, the peg-legged gardener who comes home singing in the middle of the night when he gets drunk, and the wonderfully untidy garden outside, where they can play.
Uncle Ambrose confesses to the children that he has actually missed his students since he retired from teaching. He isn’t particularly fond of children by themselves, but he is fond of teaching them. As a condition of the children staying with him, Uncle Ambrose insists that they allow him to educate them. The children agree to this because one of their reasons for running away was so they would not be split up when Robert and Nan were sent to boarding school. The children just want to stay together with their dog. Uncle Ambrose agrees to this, saying that he doesn’t approve of sending young girls to boarding school at all, although he insists that girls be properly educated as well as boys. He says that he wouldn’t even consider sending Robert to boarding school until he’s had a better grounding because he’s not satisfied with the reports he’s had of Robert’s academic abilities. The children aren’t thrilled at the idea of studying, but they agree to it because staying together and studying with Uncle Ambrose sounds better than being split up or the other alternative, being sent to stay with their Uncle Edgar in Birmingham. Also, Uncle Ambrose is willing to give the children some time each day to themselves, to play or do what they want. He won’t even insist that they show up for meals, but if they miss them, they’ll just have to go hungry. (See? I told you it was a better strategy than fighting to get them out of the hen house.) As much as the kids don’t like the idea of studying, they love the idea of having some freedom. Freedom means that adventures could happen.
Now, the story at this point could have been a complete story by itself – a group of wild, undisciplined kids are left with their strict grandmother, and after a battle of wills between the children and the grandmother and some overly-harsh punishment, the children run away, finding a gruff but kindly bachelor uncle who rediscovers the pleasure of having children around and also happens to have once been a teacher and can tutor the children while their father is away, managing to inspire the children to behave a little better and learn to make some better decisions by granting them a little freedom to make some of their own choices instead of being too controlling. That’s all very nice as a single story. However, in this case, all of that is just the background for the story to come. We’re still in just the first part of the book.
Segue to the Magic
After it’s settled that the children will stay with Uncle Ambrose, they decided to go into town for their first free excursion. They stop at the little store in town to buy some sweets and a picture postcard to send to their grandmother because Nan has been thinking over their time with her and has realized that they were badly behaved and feels guilty about it. The store is managed by Emma Cobley, an old woman in an old-fashioned dress and cap and a red shawl who owns a black cat named Frederick. Emma is a little creepy and she warns the children to stay away from Lion Tor because it’s a dangerous place. (A “tor” is “a high, craggy hill.”)
When the children return to the house, Ezra insists upon introducing them to the bees. The children think that this is a very odd thing to do, but Ezra says that it’s important, and he asks the bees to look after the children. Timothy asks if it’s possible for bees to look out for people, and Ezra says that they once saved his life when he fell into an old tin mine and showed the vicar (the children’s uncle, after he retired from teaching – they’re all living at the vicarage now) where to find him. When Ezra hears that they’ve been to Emma Cobley’s shop, he tells them not to go there anymore. The most Uncle Ambrose buys there is stamps, but neither of them ever buys anything else from her, and Ezra is reluctant to tell the children why. There is something a bit creepy about Emma and some suspicious things in her shop, like the overly-appealing candy and the one postcard that she refuses to allow the children to buy or even look at for long.
As the children start having lessons with Uncle Ambrose, Robert asks him if he will be giving them pocket money. Uncle Ambrose says that he doesn’t give pocket money, but there are opportunities for earning some. He gives them a list of chores that they can do and what he’s willing to pay for doing them. He also points out to Robert that, as the oldest boy, he can’t expect to wriggle out of the tougher chores or leave them to the girls, but if he’s willing to tackle the tougher chores, he will pay him well for it. Uncle Ambrose has somewhat chivalrous sensibilities about what girls can handle, and he also reminds the boys that there are consequences for misbehavior, lying, or stealing. He says that he would never use corporal punishment on a girl, but he has caned boys before and could do the same to his nephews if they give him reason. He tells the children that, from this point on, they cannot interrupt their lesson time with any subjects that aren’t related to the lesson. (He never does hit any of the children and does make reasonable exceptions to this rule later in the story.) It isn’t just the threat of punishment that keeps the children in line, though. It turns out that Uncle Ambrose is an excellent story-teller, and when he starts describing other countries or historical events, the children are captivated. In many ways, Uncle Ambrose makes learning fun because he really loves his subjects and knows how to share what’s fascinating about them with other people. There are parts of the learning that seem like drudgery, but they are balanced out by the parts that are truly fascinating.
The children also gradually begin learning more about the other people who live nearby. There is a black man (called a “Negro” in the story) called Moses Glory Glory Alleluja. (That’s apparently his real name in the story and not just a nickname, to which I say, “God help us all!”) When the children first see him, they’re startled and afraid of him because he’s carrying a curved knife and looks like “a coal-black giant.” They stop and stare at him because they’re afraid, and Ezra tells them not to hurt the poor man’s feelings because he’s a gentle man. As he gets closer to the children, they realize that he’s not as fearsome as they had first thought from a distance. He’s actually very pleasant, and the knife he’s carrying is just a scythe for clearing plants.
Moses works for Lady Alicia (a sort of man-of-all work – cook, gardener, butler, etc.), and Lady Alicia also has a monkey called Abednego. When the kids go with Ezra to pick up a couple of extra beds that Uncle Ambrose is borrowing from Lady Alicia for the children, Abednego takes Betsy’s doll, and she has to chase after him to get it back. In the process, Betsy meets Lady Alicia, an elderly lady in very worn fancy clothes and wearing jewelry. The two of them introduce themselves to each other and explain a little about who they are. Lady Alicia once lived there with her husband and son, but she says that her son, Francis, was “lost” years ago on Lion Tor at the age of eight. She doesn’t explain at this point how that happened or even if her son died or simply disappeared. Her husband also disappeared a few years later overseas because he was a traveler and explorer. She doesn’t seem to expect to see either of them again. This is really where the main plot of the book is introduced.
The Magic
So, now we know that there’s a creepy old lady who owns a shop that isn’t quite what it seems to be and a mysterious and sad old lady whose husband and son have disappeared, and it’s all connected to Lion Tor. The children’s first encounter with Lion Tor happens when Betsy’s siblings realize that she’s missing at Lady Alicia’s house. Not knowing that she’s with Lady Alicia, they assume that she’s wandered off into the woods to pick flowers and go searching for her. Nan finds her way to Lion Tor, where she discovers a cave that is filled with paintings. She knows they weren’t done by cave people ages ago because people in the drawings are wearing modern hats. The artist turns out to be a bearded man in ragged clothes who seems unable to speak.
Nan learns that this man is called Daft Davie, but Nan doesn’t think that’s fair because he seems intelligent and artistically talented, even though he isn’t able to speak. Ezra explains to her that Davie used to work for a blacksmith in another village nearby but some boys kept teasing him and tormenting him because he couldn’t speak, so he eventually went to live by himself at Lion Tor.
The boys eventually find Betsy with Lady Alicia. To their surprise, Lady Alicia seems to be enjoying Betsy’s company, even though she doesn’t normally like visitors. She invites the children to return again with Nan, making an odd comment about how the Linnet family seems “inevitable” but might do her some good.
Uncle Ambrose allows Nan to use the parlor of his house as her private room, where she can do her sewing and darning or just have time to herself. He says that he hasn’t done much with the parlor himself, other than putting furniture in it, because the parlor is usually for the lady of the house, and he’s unmarried. Now that Nan is there, she counts as the lady of the house as the oldest girl, and Uncle Ambrose can tell that she’s a reflective kind of person who can use some quiet time to herself, away from the other children. Nan is appreciative, and she’s also surprised when Uncle Ambrose tells her that the previous lady of the house was Lady Alicia. Before her marriage to the local lord, she was the daughter of the previous vicar, and he found some of her old books in a hidden cabinet in the room.
Uncle Ambrose removed the books from the hidden cabinet and put them on the bookshelf in the room, but out of curiosity, Nan investigates the hidden cabinet and finds that it still contains a notebook. However, the notebook belonged to a young Emma Cobley, not Lady Alicia. The notebook contains what looks like evil witchcraft spells. Nan is alarmed, although later, she’s confused because she sees Emma Cobley at church. She isn’t sure what to think because she can’t imagine that a real, evil witch would go to church. Nan considers that perhaps Emma used to practice witchcraft in her youth but repented later and changed her ways. However, if that’s true, why does Ezra disapprove of her, and how can they explain Emma’s creepy black cat? When Nan studies the spells in the book, seeing spells that can prevent a person from speaking, cause a person to lose his memory, and cause a person to forget affection for another, Emma’s true character and some of the mysterious events of the past begin coming a little more clear.
When Nan talks to Ezra later, he says that Emma Cobley’s father was a black-hearted warlock who taught her evil spells. Ezra says that his own mother practiced white magic and that his family is descended from ancient peoples who were called fairies or gods. Nan had thought that there was something gnome-like in his appearance and isn’t surprised that he’s a bit magical. Ezra further describes the day that Lady Alicia’s son disappeared at Lion Tor. They’d been on a picnic with the boy’s nurse, and the nurse and the boy had been playing hide-and-seek. A mist came up, and they were unable to find the boy. They feared that he might have drowned in the marsh because his cap was nearby, but they were never able to establish that. Some other people thought he might have been kidnapped by gypsies, but there was no evidence of that, either.
In the cemetery of the churchyard, there is a memorial to Lady Alicia’s husband, Hugo Francis Valerian, and his son who was named after him, but the husband’s death date is unknown. The children argue about what that really means. Robert says that the Valerians are dead, but they’re just not buried at the site of the memorial because they were lost and nobody knows exactly when they died and where the bodies are. However, Betsy has the feeling that they’re not dead, and Nan agrees that disappearing isn’t the same as dying. But, is that really true? Are the Valerians alive or dead, and if they are alive, where are they?
Pieces of the past continue falling into place. Betsy and Nan accidentally find old love letters that Emma Cobley wrote to the elder Hugo Valerian … love letters that also contain angry threats when the love wasn’t returned. Pictures that Davie painted on the walls of his cave resemble ones from Lady Alicia’s tapestry. Uncle Ambrose doesn’t believe in the power of witches and thinks that what Ezra has been saying about magic and spells is just superstition, but Ezra knows a few things that Uncle Ambrose doesn’t. He’s the one who knows how to undo Emma Cobley’s wicked spells.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. Sometimes, this book also appears under the title The Runaways.
My Reaction and Spoilers
A Few Concerns
I didn’t like the parts with the harsh punishments or threats of it for the children. Locking children up or caning them would be considered child abuse by modern standards, although my feelings about that are somewhat offset because they kids are pretty wild and the book makes it clear that they are badly behaved in the beginning and provoked the punishment they received. I’m willing to let it go partly because nobody actually gets caned and because of the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. In fairy tales, there is often a cruel relative, and in this case, it’s more like an overly-provoked one at her wit’s end. In either case, the children’s situation with their grandmother in the beginning establishes the reason why they go to live with their eccentric uncle and have magical adventures.
Some people might not care for the different standards for boys and girls in the story. It’s old-fashioned, out of date even for the time when the book was first published, but the setting is also old-fashioned, so I think it’s meant to establish the time and place. It’s common in older children’s books and stories that imitate them for boys to be given more freedom than girls but also for boys to be subjected to harsher, more physical punishments when they get out of line. Uncle Ambrose seems to have similar feelings in that direction, although he does give the boys and girls the same lessons because he feels that girls’ minds also need to be educated, and he allows all of the children to have equal free time and ability to play and explore the area together.
As another reviewer of this book observed, it seems a little strange that the children would be so frightened of Moses when they first meet him because they used to live in India, and you would think that they would be accustomed to the idea that there are people of different races in the world. This can’t be the first time that they’ve seen people who look different, although I suppose they could be a little intimidated by him being especially tall and carrying a scythe. That might be something that would be a little startling to see very suddenly until you look again and realize it’s just a really tall guy with a farm implement because we’re living in the countryside now. I liked the warning from Ezra to the children to behave themselves and not hurt Moses’s feelings. I thought it was good to emphasize that other people’s feelings are important, and that comment helped to humanize Moses because, even if he looks a little strange or intimidating at first, he’s still a human being with feelings.
However, there is another part of the story not too long after that, when they’re looking for Betsy and Robert, who has a habit of play-acting, pretends like he’s a Roman emperor giving a command to a “coal-black Nubian standard-bearer”, saying, “Slave, lead on.” There seems to be some self-awareness in the story that this wasn’t a good thing for Robert to say to Moses (who is a servant, not a slave, although Ezra later says that there is a rumor that Lady Alicia’s husband may have bought him in a slave market overseas when he was young), and Timothy is concerned that Robert might have offended him. The story says that Moses isn’t the kind of person who takes offense or holds grudges, and he seems to understand that Robert is play-acting, but I felt like this somewhat undermined the message of considering other people’s feelings by suggesting that the best way to be is not to have any particular feelings to consider. That’s not something anybody can count on in real life or insist that others provide for them. Real human beings are not like stuffed teddy bears, who can take endless abuse or respond to any comment with a constant smile and still be lovable and want to snuggle afterward, like none of it matters. Real humans have both feelings and limits, and this is one instance where I felt like someone should have thrown a little cold water on Robert’s play-acting. The whole story has an air of unreality about it, which is part of the charm, but I think even fantasy stories should be real about human behavior.
The Fantasy
The fantasy in the story is really very light, compared to most fantasy books. Although it becomes well-established by the end of the book that Emma Cobley is definitely a witch who cast evil spells which caused Lady Alicia to lose both her son and her husband, the spells and their undoing were done in such a way that Uncle Ambrose never seems to realize that it was all magic. Basically, the children and Ezra find the little figures with pins in them that Emma made, and Ezra recites a magical rhyme that allows them to remove the pins, thus breaking the spells. Then, they burn the figures and Emma’s old spell book, destroying her magic forever. After that, Lady Alicia’s son and husband both come back, Emma actually becomes a much nicer person, and everybody lives happily ever after.
The pace of the story is fairly slow, which is actually part of its atmospheric charm. For a book dealing with an evil witch, black magic spells, and unhappy people, it’s really pretty relaxing. I think part of that effect is because of its gradual pace and also because there are never very serious consequences for anybody in the story. It’s sad that Lady Alicia, her husband, and her son were all parted from each other for a period of years, but when the spells are broken, they are pretty quickly very happy again. Emma Cobley does try to prevent the children from learning her secrets and breaking the spells, but really, nothing bad happens to the children at all. There is one semi-frightening part where the boys and their dog are up a tree with Emma and her friends below it, but then Uncle Ambrose comes and takes the children home, and everything is fine. Emma tries to cast spells on the children at once point, but the children don’t even notice until they find the figures of themselves later. Ezra tells them that the witch’s spells were ineffective against them because he made his own figures of the children first and put them in the church, so they are protected. Emma herself faces no consequences in the end, either. They don’t have to destroy the witch to destroy her magic, and once her magic is gone, she is so changed and everyone is so happy that there’s no retribution, only forgiveness.
On the one hand, the lack of consequences in the story for things the children do make the story feel like the stakes are low. There is a sense of sadness around characters in the story, but is no particular sense of urgency. They are not racing the clock to break the spells, and the villains are pretty ineffectual at putting up obstacles to their success. On the other hand, it seems like most of the story focuses on atmosphere over action. This little village is an enchanting place to be. It’s charming, and the lack of consequences for the children, whether it’s for being racially insensitive or facing down a witch or even just staying out late, make the story feel like a very safe kind of adventure. Uncle Ambrose, Ezra, and their bees won’t let anything serious befall the children, and the worst punishment they have for misbehavior is being sent to bed with gruel (a kind of thin porridge) instead of a proper supper. Uncle Ambrose told them that if they missed meals, it would be their fault, and they’d have to go without. However, he never lets children go to bed hungry, and he even allows them sugar on their gruel. Again, very low stakes, but charmingly so. This story is not stressful, which is good, but it’s not for people looking for excitement.
I was a little impatient with the children for not making the connection between the spells in the book and Daft Davie even after seeing the figurines, including the one with the pin in its tongue. This spell is supposed to prevent people from talking, and who else do they know who can’t talk? There aren’t that many people in the area, and there’s only one person in the story whose main characteristic is an inability to speak. Even as they’re breaking the spells, they don’t know who they’re breaking them for, like they can’t even guess, and Nan is surprised when Davie can suddenly talk afterward. I think this is one of those stories that wants to make readers feel clever for figuring it out before the characters, but that can also feel a little frustrating. If there’s one thing I would change about this story (other than the racial bits), I would want the children to realize the truth about the spells faster and break them more deliberately.
I don’t really mind that Uncle Ambrose never believes in the magic. The book leaves the situation a little open for the characters, and possibly even the readers, to believe that there are other explanations for what happens. Maybe “Davie” lost his memory and ability to speak through an illness. The children in the story know that’s not it, but it’s not important for anybody else to know. Although, perhaps Uncle Ambrose knows more about magic than he lets on because, for reasons that are never explained, his pony never grows old, and his pet owl seems immortal. But, maybe that’s for the readers to decide.
