Posted on by TracyC

The Codebreaker Kids

CodebreakerKidsThe Codebreaker Kids by George Edward Stanley, 1987.

Dinky Lakewood likes living in Washington, D.C. because it’s such an interesting place, and he loves the stories about spies and government intrigue that appear in the local newspaper.  His father, who deals in plumbing supplies, thinks that all this sneaking and spying is awful and threatens to move his family somewhere else when he hears about another spy being caught, but Dinky decides that he’s going to get in on the action because he has a special skill that the spies really need.

The newspapers say that the reason why the latest spy was caught was because he and his associates were so bad at cryptology — they either picked codes that were way too hard or way too easy to decode.  Although Dinky’s parents don’t like spies, they did give him a book about secret codes for his birthday: The Complete and Total Book of All the Secret Codes That Have Ever Been Devised and That Ever Will Be Devised.  Dinky has worked his way through all of the codes in the book, so he feels qualified to open his own Secret Code Service, helping spies to encode and decode their secret messages.

Dinky recruits his best friend Wong and a girl he knows from school named Lulu to be part of his organization.  Lulu is a little strange, but Dinky knows that she’s always wanted to be a spy, so he figures that she would be good for dealing with real spies.  Wong is more interested in the money because he wants to get a new bike.

Their first clients are a little strange.  One of them is an elderly lady, Emma, who wants to stop her younger sister from snooping in her diary.  She turns out to be a repeat visitor because her sister turns out to have a talent for breaking codes.  The next client is Boris, the world’s worst Bulgarian spy.  He admits that he’s horrible with codes because he cheated at spy school, copying off of a cute female spy.  Dinky and his friends help him, although they start to question whether they’re doing the right thing since he is obviously spying on their country and they might be guilty of treason.

They decide that Boris is protected under their pledge of confidentiality, but soon, Dinky is approached by someone from the State Department, who turns out to be tracking Boris the Bulgarian.  Can Dinky and his friends continue their service, helping both sides at the same time?  Also, will they ever figure out a code that Emma’s sister can’t break?

The premise of the story is a little corny, with spies and government agencies going to a kid’s backyard clubhouse for help with some pretty simple codes, but the book is a lot of fun and doesn’t take itself seriously.  It’s a good introduction to cryptology for children, starting out with very simple Caesar ciphers (basic substitution codes) and gradually moving on to more difficult ones, like Trithemius’s Square Table.  There are points in the story where readers are given the chance to decode messages before Dinky does, and in the back, there are some additional secret messages to decode using the codes presented in the book.

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive.  There is a sequel to this book, but unfortunately, I don’t have it and never read it.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Secret Message

secretmessageMystery of the Secret Message by Elizabeth Honness, 1961.

Penny lives with her aunt and uncle because her mother is dead and her father travels on business much of the time, dealing in Asian art.  Thanks to his travels, Penny and her aunt and uncle have quite a collection of Asian art themselves.  However, Penny has just been told that her father’s airplane crashed in the Pacific Ocean.  No survivors have been found, although Penny still has hope that perhaps her father survived and might yet be found.

At the same time, Penny and her aunt and uncle are moving into a house from the apartment where they used to live. Penny is happy about the move because she knows that she won’t have to worry as much about being quiet and not disturbing the neighbors, like she had to do in their apartment. This means that Penny can bring her friends over to the house to play and have parties. Also, their new house has a very special feature: its own private elevator.

Penny loves the new house and soon begins building a tree house with the help of Pete, a boy who lives nearby.  She tells Pete about her father and her hopes that he might still be alive.

However, events take a disturbing turn when Penny receives a package from Japan containing a beautiful wall scroll. The package appears to have been sent by her father, who meant it as a present for her new room in her new house. Was the package sent before his death, or did he somehow survive the crash?

There is also something odd about Penny’s new neighbors.  Penny’s new house is actually half of a duplex, and the new neighbors, the Carruthers, have also recently moved in after renting the other half. When Penny accidentally gets stuck in the elevator and hears voices coming through the wall, she starts to suspect that her neighbors might not be what they seem to be.  They show an unusual interest in her family’s collection of Asian art, asking to see pieces and borrow pieces for an exhibition that Mr. Carruthers is holding at his gallery.  One of Penny’s friends even catches Mrs. Carruthers sneaking around, looking at things uninvited.

When Penny and her friends have a sleepover on an evening when her aunt and uncle are out, someone sneaks into the house, leaving muddy footprints on the floor.  Penny isn’t sure that her aunt and uncle will believe her because they seem to like the Carruthers, so at Pete’s suggestion, she continues to spy on them, using the elevator to listen in on their conversations through the walls.

When her uncle catches her one day, using the elevator without permission (something she is not supposed to do), she finally explains her suspicions and what’s she’s heard the Carruthers say.  Together, Penny and her uncle discover a hidden secret about the wall scroll Penny recently received, which points to a number of secrets that Penny’s father kept from her and the rest of his family for years.  A stranger from the government helps Penny to fill in some of the blanks, but he has a favor to ask in return that requires Penny to take a big risk.

My Reaction and Spoilers

Although this book is much older than I am, it was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, yet another of my used book sale treasures! I actually got rid of my first copy years ago, when I was cleaning some things out, but I missed it, so I got another one. It’s actually a collector’s item these days.

I always liked the feature of the elevator in the story and how Penny uses it to find the right spot to hear what her neighbors are saying through the wall. I love intrigue, and as a kid, I liked the idea both having a house with an elevator and of overhearing clandestine conversations that reveal sinister secrets. There are points in the story where the two-faced Carruthers think that they have the upper hand, and Penny has to be careful not to let on just how much she knows.

As I explained, the neighbors are not what they seem to be, and Penny’s father was involved in things that his family knew nothing about. Since it’s not easy to get hold of this book right now, I’ll include a couple of spoilers. Penny’s father was acting as a spy for the US government, using his profession as an art dealer to travel to locations he needed to go and to smuggle information back to the US. He is apparently dead, killed in the plane crash, although there are hints that the crash wasn’t an accident, that it may have been intended to kill him. However, before his death, he managed to smuggle his last important information to Penny in the wall scroll that he sent her. When Penny manages to convince her uncle that something isn’t right about the Carruthers, he begins making inquiries and learns the truth about Penny’s father. A government agent speaks to the family and arranges a plan to fool the Carruthers into thinking that they’ve found what they were looking for, but the plan requires Penny to spend an evening in the house alone with them.

Posted on by TracyC

In the Kaiser’s Clutch

KaisersClutchIn the Kaiser’s Clutch by Kathleen Karr, 1995.

After their father’s death during World War I  (then called The Great War), the Dalton twins’ mother started supporting their family by writing.  It’s the summer of 1918, and Dorothy Dalton is now writing the scripts for a silent movie serial starring the fifteen-year-old twins, Nelly and Fitzhugh.  Times have been tough for them without their father’s support, but the serial means steady work and salaries for all three of them for the entire summer, enough to support them and buy school supplies for the fall, and maybe even enough to buy back some of the things that their mother pawned to keep their family going when they had to move out of New York to a less expensive town in New Jersey.

The movie serial, called In the Kaiser’s Clutch, is about a pair of wealthy American twins (played by Nelly and Fitz) who find themselves battling German spies.  The serial is part adventure story, part American war propaganda.  It’s also a subject that hits close to home.  The Dalton twins’ father wasn’t killed while fighting overseas.  He was in charge of the security force for the piers of Black Tom Island, just off the coast of New York, the port where most of the weaponry destined for the war in Europe was being shipped.  However, a massive explosion destroyed the port at Black Tom and killed Mr. Dalton.  Fitz wishes that he were old enough to fight directly in the war, but failing that, he wants to find the people who killed his father because he is sure that his father’s death was due to deliberate sabotage, not an accident.  However, it’s possible that the saboteur himself is looking for the Dalton family.

Strange things start to happen which the twins realize may have some bearing on their father’s death.  Someone has been spying on the family, listening by the window of their apartment.  Then, the director of their movie serial hires a new, part-time actor to play one of the villains, and this man is oddly similar to the fleeing figure of the man who was spying on them.  This new actor is German, and he seems to have some weird grudge against the twins, muttering insults in German and taking advantage of the stunts they have to perform in the movies to hurt and frighten them.  There are plenty of opportunities for the twins to get hurt on the movie set because each episode of the series has to end with a cliff-hanger scene, and there are no stunt doubles.  (Early silent movies in real life typically didn’t have stunt doubles, and the stunts were difficult and dangerous for the actors themselves.  This YouTube video explain how Buster Keaton, a famous silent film actor, performed his own stunts.)  From fist fights to car chases to quicksand to a cave-in to a giant pendulum with a mysteriously sharpened edge to sudden explosions, the Dalton twins are constantly teetering on the edge of disaster, not all of it planned by their writer mother.

Mrs. Dalton admits to the twins that, shortly before their father died, he told her that he was close to uncovering something that would be a much better story than anything she could make up.  Unfortunately, he never told her what it was.  He did tell her that he was making notes about it, but those notes were never found and may have also been destroyed in the explosion.  The only odd thing that Mrs. Dalton found after her husband’s death seemed like an ordinary shopping list: “cigars, eggs, dumplings, coal, pencils.”  However, Mrs. Dalton realized later that it has to mean something else because her husband didn’t smoke.

Could this somehow be the clue to what her husband was investigating before his death?  Are there real spies operating in the area?  Is there some other clue to their identity that they are now searching for, something that the Daltons still have in their possession?  Will the Dalton twins manage to find the spies before the spies eliminate them?  Will the family finish the serial and collect their salaries?  Find out in this exciting installment!  (There’s only one installment here because this is just a single book, not part of a series, but you get the idea.)

My Reaction

World War I books aren’t quite as common in children’s literature as World War II stories, so I found this interesting, and movie serials are also a fascinating thing of the past.  The movies that the kids are acting in are black-and-white silent films, so there are interesting discussions of the techniques they use to make things show up properly on black-and-white film (makeup, dyeing the water black for Nelly’s near-drowning scene, etc.) and conveying emotion when the actors’ voices will not actually be heard.  It’s a fun and fascinating story with spies, government agents, and the kind of movie stunts that I’m sure a lot of kids wish they could do for their summer jobs!

Posted on by TracyC

Beware the Fish!

bewarefishBeware the Fish! by Gordon Korman, 1980.

In spite of MacDonald Hall’s prestigious reputation, it is continually plagued by money problems.  The students can’t help but notice all the budget cutbacks, and now, there are rumors that the school might even have to close permanently.  The last thing anyone wants is to leave MacDonald Hall.  Bruno, the school’s resident idea man and master prankster, decides to spearhead a movement to raise money and publicity for MacDonald Hall so they can save the school!

Bruno, his best friend Boots, and their other fellow students try everything they can think of to spread the word about what a great place MacDonald Hall is so that enrollment will go up and the school can earn enough money to stay open.  They enlist the help of the girls at the nearby finishing school to help them break a world record.  The school’s science whiz, Elmer, shows the boys some of his inventions in the hope that one of them will make the school famous.

Unfortunately, as usual, nothing turns out as planned.  World records are extremely difficult to break, and Elmer’s inventions backfire.  One of his inventions backfires in such a way that it comes to the attention of the local police, and even the government becomes convinced that a gang of terrorists may be operating somewhere in the vicinity of MacDonald Hall.

The boys try to keep their activities secret from their headmaster, Mr. Sturgeon (or, as the boys nickname him, “The Fish”), while government agents snoop around, looking for the head of the organization that’s been issuing cryptic messages over television signals, a shadowy figure known only as “The Fish.”

This book is part of the MacDonald Hall Series (or Bruno and Boots series).  It is currently available online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Toying With Danger

toyingwithdangerToying With Danger by Drew Stevenson, 1993.

Sarah Capshaw is lamenting to her friend Clark that she hasn’t had an interesting case to solve since she and her parents moved to Wilsonburg when their friend Frog tells them that the local bully saw a monster at the old Harley farm outside of town.  Rumor has it that a mad scientist bought the place.  Naturally, Sarah wants to investigate.

It turns out that the “mad scientist,” Dr. Becker, is actually an eccentric toy inventor.  The “monster” is an electronic Frankenstein monster.  Dr. Becker is actually pretty nice and is even interested in seeing the detective board game that Frog is trying to invent.

Even though the monster wasn’t a real monster, there are still strange things happening in the woods surrounding the old farm where Dr. Becker’s workshop is.  The local bully is hanging around in the woods and trying to scare everyone away.  The kids also see a mysterious man hanging around, and Sarah wonders if he could be spying on Dr. Becker in order to steal his designs.

toyingwithdangerpic2It seems that Sarah is right that someone is trying to spy on Dr. Becker.  The kids learn more about the money involved in buying and selling toy designs when they visit the Too Wonderful toy company for a tour with Sarah’s grandfather.  Making toys is serious business, and companies guard their designs very carefully.  The Too Wonderful toy company wants to purchase some of Dr. Becker’s designs, but one of the members of the company says some strange things about Dr. Becker.  Can the kids trust him?  Can they trust the strange Dr. Becker?  Can Sarah catch the spy before it’s too late?

This is part of the Sarah Capshaw Mysteries series.