Posted on by TracyC

The Silver Spoon Mystery

The Silver Spoon Mystery by Dorothy Sterling, 1958.

A group of families move into the new suburb built on The Hill overlooking the town of Dwighton. The kids in the new neighborhood become close friends, visiting each other’s houses, playing games, and running around town together. It’s idyllic, but then the boys in the group start playing baseball together, and they begin excluding the girls from the group, even though they’ve all played baseball together before and the girls are good at it. The boys also stop working on the tree house that the kids were all making together, taking some of the tools and materials and building themselves a clubhouse near the baseball field with a sign that says, “NO GIRLS ALLOWED.”

The girls are offended at suddenly being shunned by the boys, so they decide that they need to have some special project, something that will show the boys that girls are just as good as they are and that the girls don’t have to rely on the boys to have some fun. They decide to start a neighborhood newspaper, writing about local events and having fun stuff, like jokes. The newspaper is a success, and adult neighbors buy copies. Then, the boys decide to start a competing newspaper themselves. One of the girls, Peggy, is upset because she’s sure that the boys’ newspaper will be more successful. Some of the boys are older than the girls so they might write better, there are more boys than girls in the group so they have more people to gather news and sell papers, Davey is better at drawing cartoons than the girls are, and worst of all, the boys splurged to buy a hectograph, which uses a gelatin substance for making copies of writing and drawings (as in this video) and will allow the boys to print papers by the hundred (“hecto” means one hundred, and that’s how many copies a hectograph makes at a time). (This is before home computers, so the characters have to rely on manual printing methods. People used hectographs to make copies before modern copy machines, but modern hectographs still exist, and some people use them for artwork or tattoo stencils.)

Peggy’s afraid that the girls won’t be able to compete with the boys’ advantages and thinks that the boys are mean for trying to steal their business. Peggy’s mother tells her that she shouldn’t worry about being better than the boys but focus on being different. She says that the girls should make sure that their paper has different content from the boys’ paper so people will still have a reason to buy theirs even if they’ve already bought the boys’ paper. If the boys’ paper has cartoons, the girls’ paper should have things the boys wouldn’t think to include, like recipes, poems, and fictional stories that could be written and submitted by local people.

Peggy gets an idea from what her mother says, but it’s not a good one. Peggy still wants to show up the boys, and she thinks that the best way to do it is to get a “scoop”, meaning printing an exiting news story that the boys won’t have in their paper. The problem is that the girls don’t know where they’re going to get an exciting news story that the boys don’t know anything about. Nothing that exciting is happening in their town anyway. There haven’t been any shocking events, no murders, no robberies. Peggy tells the other girls that means that they have write about something that hasn’t happened yet. Peggy poses the idea of writing about someone stealing the silver on display at the local library that was made by the silversmith who was the founder of their town. Of course, the problem with that is that the silver hasn’t actually been stolen. One of the girls, Ellen, objects to writing a story about something that hasn’t happened because that’s not actually “news.” However, Peggy talks the other girls into it by saying that they would be writing about it as fiction because people write fictional books all the time, and that’s allowed. Ellen still isn’t convinced, but Peggy goes ahead and writes the story anyway. (Basically, she’s turning the girls’ newspaper into a tabloid, although the kids don’t seem to quite get the difference, even though Ellen can tell that this isn’t right for a newspaper.) The girls all discuss how they would go about stealing the silver spoons from the library, if they were going to do it, and Peggy writes the story from their speculations.

You just know that there’s going to be trouble with Peggy trying to sell a story that everyone knows didn’t happen, but what actually happens is even stranger. After the girls sell their paper with the spoon theft story, Peggy gets home to find a policeman, Lieutenant Peters, waiting for her with her mother. Lieutenant Peters wants to talk to Peggy about the robbery at the library because it turns out that the very night when Peggy was writing her big fictional scoop about silver spoons being stolen from the library, someone was in fact stealing silver spoons from the library, and this thief apparently did it the way Peggy described in her story. Lieutenant Peters wants to know everything that Peggy knows about the theft, and he won’t believe that Peggy wasn’t there to witness it because her description of what happened is so accurate. She even has a description of the thief in her story. Since the theft happened in the middle of the night, Peggy points out that she was asleep in bed, but even Peggy’s mother isn’t sure that Peggy didn’t sneak out. When Peggy’s friends show up at her house, Lieutenant Peters questions them too and comes to the conclusion that Peggy and maybe also her friends stole the spoons themselves to make their story true. Lieutenant Peters says that they’ll be forgiven if they give the spoons back, but the girls can’t do that because they don’t have them.

As Lieutenant Peters and Peggy’s mother continue to question the girls about their story, the girls admit that they made up the whole thing as a fictional story just to attract attention to their paper. Lieutenant Peters catches the boys listening in on their conversation and questions them about what they know about the situation. The boys don’t really know anything about the theft, either, but they were pretty sure that Peggy made up the story she wrote, and they’re fascinated that she might be about to be arrested and taken to “children’s jail.” Peggy’s mother believes her that she just made up the story and it’s all a coincidence that someone happened to steal the silver spoons from the library around the same time, but Lieutenant Peters isn’t convinced.

Word of the spoon theft spreads across town quickly, partly because of Peggy’s story in the neighborhood newspaper and partly because of the story in the regular news. People call Peggy’s house to ask for details, and kids at school look at Peggy and her friends suspiciously, wondering how much they had to do with the theft. Peggy is especially offended when Davey says that his father thinks that it’s an unlikely coincidence that Peggy would write a story about the theft and then the theft would just happen. Before the boys started their “no girls allowed” stuff, Peggy and Davey used to be close friends. However, Davey assures her that he doesn’t think that she’s responsible for the theft. He also tells her that he and the other boys are sorry about pushing the girls by trying to compete with their paper, and they’ve decided to give up theirs and let the girls use the hectograph. The kids discuss trying to investigate the crime themselves because, until the real thief is found, people are going to keep looking at the girls suspiciously.

Most of the neighborhood kids, both boys and girls, join the investigation as the “Hill Detective Club”, except for one of the older girls who is studying for exams and Davey’s older brother, Allen, the only boy who’s mad at the other boys because they don’t want to play baseball now. (Allen is apparently the one who started all the “no girls allowed” stuff because he didn’t make the high school baseball team and he’s been ultra-serious about practicing during the neighborhood games. He’s trying to organize a game between the boys in the neighborhood and their fathers. The book doesn’t explicitly say so, but there might also be an element of embarrassment for him that some of the girls play better than he does. Peggy is described as being the fastest runner in the neighborhood, and Ellen is a good batter.) As they begin their investigation, the kids visit the scene of the crime and study the ways the thief could have gotten into the library, starting to separate the made-up details from Peggy’s fictional story from the real facts and circumstances of the case. Peggy admits that her mind is biased because she still thinks of her story as the way things happened and her fictional suspect as the type of thief they’re looking for, but the truth is that they don’t know for sure how the crime actually happened or what type of person they’re looking for.

When the kids talk to one of the librarians, Miss Bancroft, they learn that the police did find a few sets of fingerprints on the case that held the silver spoons: Miss Lowell, the head librarian; Mrs. Simpson, a descendant of the town’s founding father and part of the local antiquarian society; and Mr. Weatherspoon, who owns a local antique store. Could one of these people be the thief?

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

My Reaction

To begin with, this book seems like it’s meant for fairly young elementary students. It tries to teach readers the meaning of some of the words in the story because some of the characters don’t know the meanings of various words the other characters use or words that they encounter in various places, like “descendant” or “optometrist.” The kids in the story are a variety of ages even though they all play together in the neighborhood, and I could understand why some of the younger kids would struggle with bigger words, but there were times when I thought that they were carrying it a little far. Peggy is twelve years old, so it seems like she should have been old enough to know what an optometrist is. Has she never had her eyes checked before? Actually, maybe she never has. If her vision is good or seems good, maybe her family just doesn’t bother. I guess it’s educational for young readers just branching out into chapter books.

I like books that bring up interesting historical topics. The parts about older printing/copying techniques and Mrs. Simpson’s old electric car with the steering stick instead of a steering wheel (possibly a Baker Electric, like the one Jay Leno owns, or something very similar – this video explains the history of the Baker Electric and shows what it’s like to drive it) were interesting, and one of the characters in the story explains more about the history of the town’s famous silver spoons to the kids. Although the town, its founder, and the spoons are all fiction, spoons of this sort did exist in real life. The silver spoons are specifically christening spoons. It used to be traditional to give presents made of silver to new babies and their parents for the child’s christening. One of the most popular presents of this type was small silver baby spoons, especially with special designs or engravings to remember the child’s birth. The character explains why this particular set of spoons is so distinctive, talking about their unique design, how antique dealers would be able to look them up in a reference book and learn their history, and how each of the of the spoons is marked with the maker’s hallmark, the special symbol that the maker would use to identify himself.

Part of the mystery hinges on the coincidence of the theft occurring just when Peggy decides to write a sensational story about an imaginary theft to get attention for her neighborhood newspaper. For readers, the question is whether the timing of the actual theft is really just coincidental or if there’s a direct connection between the story of the theft and the theft itself. I would have been very disappointed in the book if it was just a coincidence, so I immediately approached the story with the idea that the timing of the theft was a clue. I enjoyed considering different possibilities. My first thought, when the theft happened mysteriously immediately after Peggy and her friends invented their theft story, was that someone overheard the girls talking about how they would commit a theft like that and decided to use their imaginary scheme as their own. However, the conversation between Peggy and her friends took place in Peggy’s room, which was pretty private. For someone to overhear them, it would have to be someone in Peggy’s own house, possibly family or a neighborhood friend, or someone listening in from outside, probably one of the neighborhood kids. Those possibilities didn’t seem likely. Then, I remembered the Nero Wolfe murder mystery story Not Quite Dead Enough. What if the theft didn’t occur when the police thought it did (mostly because they believed Peggy’s original story) but actually at the point where the theft was supposedly discovered? The person who claimed to discover the theft was one of the people with the strongest motives to commit it, and this person could have done it after reading the fake news story, seeing an opportunity to make it true and cast suspicion on Peggy’s fictional suspect. The mystery is simple enough to figure out for an adult who likes mystery stories, but probably much more mysterious for kids. Once the kids realize who has the spoons, there is also the additional challenge of proving it and getting the spoons back without getting everyone in trouble.

I thought it was interesting that the story shows some of the problems with sensationalist or tabloid style “news” stories, or “yellow journalism“, as it used to be called. It’s the sort of “news” that relies on flashy and misleading headlines, buzzwords and catch phrases that appeal to its fans and rile them up emotionally, hyperbole and emotionally-charged language, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and poorly-qualified or debunked “experts”, to draw readership and advertising money. Basically, they aren’t really “news.” They don’t try to describe things as they actually happened for informative purposes. These are “news” stories that are less about fact than about entertaining their audience or shocking people and stirring up strong emotions to grab people’s attention. That’s basically what Peggy was trying to do with her fake news story, even if she wasn’t quite thinking about it in those terms. Just like tabloid or sensationalist news, Peggy’s story was almost a kind of fan fiction based on the real world. That is, she took real things and situations that she knew existed (the silver display at the library) and wrote an exciting conspiracy story around them that didn’t actually happen (the made-up theft) as a shocking, attention-getting entertainment piece to encourage people to buy the paper she and the other girls were selling. She thought what she was doing was like harmless entertainment, but it wasn’t because it was based on something real, and her made-up story had real consequences. Not only is there a direct connection between the fake story and the real theft, but Peggy’s fake story confuses people, including the local police and insurance investigator, because they have trouble telling how much of Peggy’s story is false, and it biases their minds and the direction of their investigations. Even Peggy herself sometimes gets confused during the investigation, mixing up details from her made-up story with real events. Even though she wrote the fictional story herself, knowing it was fictional, she gets hung up on the way she imagined things would happen when she invented the story and needs to be occasionally reminded to look at the situation as it actually exists, not as she imagined it would be. If the author of the fictional news story can’t even keep her own fiction and the real facts straight in her mind at first, how can the police or anyone else?

Sensationalist journalism can and has led to real problems in real life, setting up dangerous situations by stirring up the emotions of people who may already be unbalanced and suggesting unrealistic events or courses of action that interfere with people’s sense of reality and ability to make informed, reasoned decisions (something else that ties in with the story). In a famous real life case from the early 1900s, the famous newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst had his own reputation seriously damaged when he published articles written by two of his columnists smearing President McKinley’s reputation and seemingly recommending his assassination. (“If bad institutions and bad men can be got rid of only by killing, then the killing must be done.”) These articles were published only months before President McKinley was actually assassinated. Hearst had used yellow journalism in his papers for years to manipulate public opinion to further his political causes and gain readership. (“War makes for great circulation,” Hearst said after successfully urging public opinion in favor of the Spanish-American War.) After the assassination of the president, people made a connection between the assassination the articles in Hearst’s papers seemed to be advocating (although they called it a “mental exercise” and a joke) and the assassination that actually happened. Whether Hearst actually wanted McKinley to be killed by someone or whether the man who assassinated McKinley was directly inspired by those sensationalist articles is questionable, but the suspicion that was what happened, in a sort of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” kind of moment, did seriously damage Hearst’s own political ambitions. Hearst did intentionally want to smear McKinley’s reputation, but his lack of consideration for the possible results of his stories, which seemed to be advocating an actual murder that did occur soon after, caused the public to turn against Hearst himself.

We frequently caution people to be careful of what they read because you can’t trust everything, which is sensible advice, but I’d go a little further and say, be careful of why you choose to read what you’re reading and why believe what you read. Was it because the information was presented logically and authoritatively, or is it because you decided ahead of time what you were going to read because of something you already believed or something you already knew you really wanted to do? Picking the right information source is good, but it may be even better to ask yourself what you, as an individual, plan to actually do because of the news sources you’re following. Is it a good thing to do that’s going to help someone or something that’s going to hurt people? Take a look in the mirror once in a while and question your motives as one of your own primary sources of information. You are the one who chooses what news sources you consume. You are the one who decides what you believe because you always have the choice to accept or reject anything you hear from someone else. You are the one who decides what your standards are and where your limits are set. You are the one person who knows exactly what you’re willing to do to accomplish your goals. You are the one who moves your body to the locations you decide to go and makes your mouth say the things it says and your body do the things it does. You are the one who has ability to say “yes” or “no”, not only to other people but yourself when necessary. Anything you may decide to do involves not just a single choice but multiple choices along the way that can only be made by you, so you’re going to have to be your own fact checker at every step, not just about what other people are telling you but what you’re telling yourself and why.

Sensationalist news stories are intentionally emotionally manipulative in order to get people hooked on reading that source, but you’re the only one who gets to decide if you’re hooked and what you’re going to do about it. The next time you read something that makes you really mad at somebody, before you do whatever you’re considering doing about it, pause a moment to ask, not just whether the source you just read might be wrong, but “What if I’m wrong? What if I’m wrong about this situation, and I’m about to do the wrong thing? Am I prepared to face the consequences for my actions if this turns out to be serious?” The reason for asking these questions is, if the consequences of what you’re planning to do are serious, there will be a point where people won’t want to hear about what you believed or thought you believed or what someone else told you earlier. If you’re the one who did the thing, you’re the one who’s going to be facing the consequences for that thing. There’s a point where everyone has to accept the consequences for themselves all by themselves. (To put a finer point on it, riot and people will riot with you, but you’ll be tried as an adult alone.)

Posted on by TracyC

Deadline at Spook Cabin

Deadline at Spook Cabin by Eugenia Miller, 1958.

Twelve-year-old Mitch Adams is a newsboy for the summer, but the bicycle that he uses to deliver his newspapers is old and frequently breaks down. He often has to stop and fix it, which means that getting anywhere and delivering his papers takes him longer than it does for the other newsboys. If he doesn’t do something about it soon, his bike might break down completely, and he won’t be able to keep his paper route.

However, the paper he works for is having a contest for the newsboys, and the prize is a new bicycle. If Mitch can win the new bike, his problems will be solved. He’s been saving some money that he could use to get a new bike, but he’s hoping that, if he wins the new bike, he can use the money to buy a special present for his mother – a piano to replace the one they had to sell because they needed money after his father died. It’s an important present because his mother now has a job playing the piano for a dance studio, and she’s been thinking that, if she had a piano of her own again, she could also give piano lessons. In order to win the newspaper contest, Mitch has to be on time with his route, not get any complaints from customers, and sign up more new subscribers this month than any of the other newsboys. Mitch has been working hard at it, and by his count, he’s tied for first place with another boy. If he can keep up the good work to the end of the week, he stands a good chance of winning.

Mitch also has ambitions of becoming a reporter some day. When one of the best reporters for the paper, Jim McCain, says he wants to talk to Mitch about something, Mitch is delighted. Jim invites Mitch to meet him at the newspaper office early the next day so he can show him how the reporters get information from the police and fire department for their stories. Mitch is excited because he’s been asking Jim about that and agrees to meet Jim the next morning.

The next day, Jim actually lets Mitch do some of the calling to the fire department himself after first coaching him about what to say. In particular, he teaches Mitch to base his questions around the “five W’s” – who, what, when, where, and why – that make up a story. Because they live in a small town, there isn’t any particularly startling news from the fire department or the police, but Jim explains that people will want to know what’s happening in the area anyway. Some people may have heard the sounds of a fire engine recently, so they’ll check the newspaper to find out where the fire was, even if it was just a little brush fire.

After Mitch is done with his work for the newspaper, he meets his friend Lyle and Lyle’s younger brother Beanie for a bike ride and a cookout. As they look for a good place to set up a camp fire, they find an abandoned cabin in the woods and decide to take a look inside. There’s not much there, and the boys think that it might be fun to fix it up like it’s their secret hideout and camp there some night. They give the old house the nickname “Spook Cabin” because Beanie thinks it’s kind of creepy. Exploring a little further, they also discover that there’s a tree house in one of the trees surrounding the cabin that’s hard to see from the ground.

Soon, some exciting news comes to Mitch’s paper after all. There was bank robbery in a nearby town. One of the robbers got away, and the police are searching for him. Police officers patrol the town, on the lookout for the fugitive.

Then, a report about a campfire that was left unattended comes from the local fire department. From the description of the campfire, Mitch knows that his friends were the ones who set it because they made it the way they said they would for sending smoke signals. However, they never would have left their fire unattended. Mitch knows that something bad must have happened, and his friends need his help!

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

My Reaction

This is a pretty short chapter book, and I thought it was pretty obvious where the missing bank robber was going to end up, but I really liked the story. The part I liked best was all of the information about how a newspaper works, or rather, how it worked in the mid-20th century. The book would have been educational for its time, and it still is, but many of the processes involved in putting together a newspaper would be done electronically now, using computers. The characters in the story are using manual typewriters, printing presses, and teletype machines. There’s a scene where Mitch asks Jim how the teletype machines work, and Jim explains that they’re “a combination telegraph and typewriter.” The machines in the story would be considered antiques or at least somewhat outdated now, but Jim’s tips for asking the right questions to write a story still apply. When I was a kid, though, my teachers usually said it as the “five W’s and an H” – to write a story or essay, you need to know who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how something happened.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1999.

At the end of the previous book in the series, Sammy was given a punishment from her school for causing a disturbance during an assembly that requires her to complete 20 hours of community service. She’s working off her volunteer hours at St. Mary’s Church under the supervision of Father Mayhew. When Sammy lived with her mother, they weren’t religious, and Sammy hadn’t even been baptized. However, her grandmother is much more religious, and she had Sammy baptized by Father Mayhew soon after Sammy moved in with her. Father Mayhew is kind and understanding with Sammy. There are also some nuns at St. Mary’s from an order called the Sisters of Mercy. They’re helping out in the soup kitchen. When elderly Sister Josephine sees that Sammy is painting a wall in Father Mayhew’s office, she complains that he’s always getting the services that the nuns ask for and never get. They’ve been asking to have the house where they live painted for years, and it still hasn’t happened.

Father Mayhew’s gratitude for Sammy’s help fades when a small ivory cross is stolen from his office, and he thinks that Sammy did it because she was in there. Sammy tells him that she didn’t take it, but he doesn’t believe her and sends her to go work in the soup kitchen for awhile. (He didn’t ask her to turn out her pockets before she left his office. I would have because that would settle the matter right there.) In the soup kitchen, Sammy sees another girl about her age who reminds her somewhat of herself, partly because of the high-top shoes she wear. Sammy wonders who the girl is and why she’s eating at the soup kitchen, but she isn’t able to talk to her there.

Later, Sammy discusses the missing cross with Father Mayhew again. This time, he seems less certain that Sammy took it, and Sammy asks him if it was something valuable that might have been sold for money or if someone who is angry with him could have taken it as revenge. The one person who seems angry with Father Mayhew is Sister Josephine, but he can’t picture her taking the cross. However, there are other people who might have a reason to be angry with Father Mayhew. Brother Phil, who works in the soup kitchen, wants to become a full priest, but Father Mayhew doesn’t think that he’s suited to it.

The thefts also continue. A couple of gold chalices are stolen from the church. The nuns who are part of the Sisters of Mercy turn out to be traveling and staying in a trailer, and they’re only staying at St. Mary’s temporarily to hold a fundraiser. They tell Father Mayhew that someone tried to break into their trailer, but they scared the thief off. One of the nuns ask Father Mayhew to keep an heirloom locket in his safe until she can deliver it to her niece.

Meanwhile, at school, Sammy is playing on one of her school’s two softball teams. Her school nemesis, Heather, plays on the other school team, so their feuding and rivalry has transferred to the school’s sports field.

This book is the first book in the series to bring up the subject of Sammy’s father. Sammy’s grandmother gives her a catcher’s mitt that once belonged to her father. Sammy’s mother was going to throw it out, but her grandmother rescued it from the trash, and it’s the only thing Sammy has that was once her father’s. She sees her love of playing catcher at softball as a connection to the father she’s never known. Sammy has never seen a picture of her father and doesn’t know his name, and her mother has admitted that he has no idea that Sammy exists. She has asked her mother about her father in the past, but her mother refuses to tell her who he is or what happened to him. All she has ever told Sammy is that she was young when they met and her relationship with him was a mistake. Sammy can’t help but feel that her mother things of her existence as a mistake as well, maybe even a bigger one than her relationship with her father. The fact that her mother has essentially abandoned her to pursue her dream of being an actress has left her feeling like her mother never really wanted her. Sammy has to stay with her grandmother, even though it means keeping her living arrangements a secret, because staying with her father isn’t even an option.

The next time that Sammy sees the mysterious girl in high-tops at the soup kitchen, she and her friends follow her to see where she lives. It turns out that she’s homeless and living in a cardboard box. This discovery raises some personal questions and concerns for Sammy. On the one hand, she’s unfortunate because her living situation is precarious and depends on not being caught in her grandmother’s apartment, which is meant only for seniors, but on the other, she does have her grandmother to rely on. This other poor girl doesn’t seem to have anyone. At one point, Sammy asks her grandmother about what would have happened to her if she hadn’t been able to take Sammy when her mother left. It’s an uncomfortable question for both of them because it raises the question of whether Sammy’s mother would have just abandoned her completely if she hadn’t had her mother willing to take her. Sammy’s mother doesn’t seems to care how awkward their living arrangement is because they have to keep Sammy’s presence in the apartment a secret. Without Sammy’s father in the picture, there is no one else but her grandmother to take her. There is also the constant question of what would happen to Sammy and her grandmother if someone manages to prove that Sammy is living with her against the rules. Sammy is better off than the homeless girl, not by much, but still better.

Later in the story, after Sammy’s beloved mitt is stolen, Sammy tells Hudson about everything that’s going on. She’s pretty sure that Heather is the mitt thief because she’s the one person who’s always doing awful things to her. Hudson points out that, in a way, Sammy is fortunate to know who she can trust and who she can’t, and she has one definite enemy. Holly has never really had anybody to trust before, and Father Mayhew has no idea who he can trust or not trust in his church. His thief is obviously one of the people who works with him on daily basis, someone who can come and go while seeming above suspicion, and Father Mayhew is only just beginning to realize that there are people around him he can’t trust as much as he thought.

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

My Reaction

For awhile, Sammy suspects that the homeless girl who visits the soup kitchen might be the thief who is stealing things from the church, but she’s not. The girl, whose name is Holly, becomes a regular character in the series. She is a runaway foster child who’s had an even tougher life than Sammy. When she and Sammy talk, she explains how she was abused in previous foster homes, which is why she ran away to live on her own. At one point, she is attacked by a man, and Sammy has to help fight him off. The girls realize that Holly can’t keep camping out on her own, and Sammy helps her find a place to stay with people who turn out to be able to provide a much more stable home for her, which is how she remains a character for the rest of the series. Holly begins attending school with Sammy and her friends, with her new foster family making up a story about how she transferred from New Mexico. Her new home seems to be a kind secretive foster home, not unlike Sammy’s living arrangements. Her new foster family doesn’t seem to try to legalize their custody of Holly (not in this book, anyway), possibly out of fear of her being taken away and put in other abusive or dysfunctional foster homes in the flawed system she came from. There is also a standalone book which focuses specifically on Holly called Runaway, which explains more about her personal history. Some of the things that happened to Holly are an indication that this series isn’t meant for young children. I would say that it’s best for tweens and up, probably about around the middle school level.

One of my favorite characters in this series is Hudson Graham, a retired old man who acts like a grandfather to Sammy. She often goes to see him when she needs help and advice. He is knowledgeable on an eclectic range of topics, and he has a massive private library that can answer most of Sammy’s questions. In this book, Sammy thinks about how, even though she and Hudson have talked about many things together, including his wide-ranging hobbies, she doesn’t really know that much about his past, even what he used to do for a living before he retired. Because he has a collection of foreign language dictionaries and recording devices, Sammy thinks that he might have once worked for the CIA or something. When the people who own the dog grooming business down the street lose the key to their safe because a dog ate it, Sammy asks Hudson what they can go, and he tells her some fascinated facts about safes and how to get into them. The fact that he knows about that suggested to me that he probably worked in law enforcement or security at some point. My thought is that he might have once been a private investigator because they do security work and would have some basic law knowledge and use devices that Hudson has, like recording machines and cameras. My next guess would be that he was a journalist, also because of the recording devices and cameras and because journalists can write on a wide range of topics, giving Hudson his eclectic knowledge and the need for his own private research library. Aspects of Sammy’s life and the lives of people she knows add extra mystery to the story. Hudson’s past isn’t explained in this book in the series, and I’m not sure if it ever is.

Posted on by TracyC · 3 Comments

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief

Sammy Keyes

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief by Wendelin Van Draanen, 1998.

Samantha “Sammy” Keyes lives with her grandmother in her apartment because her mother (who she calls “Lady Lana”) left her with her grandmother a year before, when she left to pursue an acting career. Much of the time, Sammy doesn’t have much to do at her grandmother’s apartment, so she spends her time watching people and nearby buildings with her binoculars. Technically, Sammy isn’t supposed to be living in her grandmother’s apartment because the apartment building is for seniors only, so they have to keep her presence a secret. Sammy only keeps a few belongings that are easily hidden, and she has to hide in a closet when people they don’t know and trust come to the door. She can’t come and go as often as she wants because her grandmother’s nosy neighbor will notice and report her. One day, while looking at a seedy hotel nearby, she witnesses someone with black gloves stealing money from someone’s purse. As she watches, this man looks directly at her and can tell that she’s watching. Sammy has the strange feeling like she’s seen the man somewhere before, but she can’t think where, and she’s nervous that he saw her, too.

A little later, Sammy’s friend, Marissa, comes to the apartment and asks Sammy to help her find her younger brother, who’s missing. Sammy knows that the best place to look for Marissa’s brother is at the pet store, so the two girls hurry off to find him. On her way back to her grandmother’s apartment, Sammy sees that there are police at the hotel, so the theft has been discovered. There are other kids standing around and watching, so Sammy decides to take a look, too. She sees the police interviewing the woman whose money was stolen. As she listens to them talk and mention looking for fingerprints, she can’t help but comment that there won’t be any fingerprints because the thief wore gloves. When the police and victim all hear her say that, they realize that she’s the only witness to the crime. As they question her, she describes what she saw while giving them as little personal information as possible so her secret of living with her grandmother won’t be exposed. When the police take down her name and address, she gives them her real name but Marissa’s address in a wealthy part of town.

The next day, both Sammy and Marissa have their first day of junior high school. Sammy immediately gets the attention of the school mean girl, Heather Acosta (who becomes her school nemesis for the rest of the series). When Heather jabs Sammy in the butt with a sharp pin, Sammy punches her in the nose. Of course, the vice principal shows all kinds of sympathy to poor Heather and punishes Sammy because he claims that nobody saw Heather jab Sammy in the butt with a pin. He makes her sit alone in a tiny closet that the school calls “the Box” to think about what she’s done. Even when Marissa tells the principal what really happened, supporting what Sammy said, the principal just says that there’s never any excuse for punching anybody and that Sammy is suspended. The vice principal expects Sammy to shake hands with her rotten abuser and make peace when she returns to school. (Ooh, I hate that. I’ve got a rant for later.)

After Sammy’s suspension, she and Marissa walk home together, and Sammy tells Marissa about what she witnessed at the hotel. When the two girls stop at the store, they see the woman whose purse was robbed and learn that she’s an astrologer called Madame Nashira (real name Gina). Surprisingly, she admits that she doesn’t really believe in fortune-telling, but she does it anyway because she needs the money. She likes drawing up astrological birth charts for people, though. There’s an interesting scene in the book where she does one for Sammy and explains how it works. (I’ve never been serious about astrology, and I doubt it even more since I took an astronomy class and my teacher showed us how to use a star globe and used it to explain why people’s birth signs aren’t their real birth signs, but it was still kind of fascinating just to think about. I’ve never actually seen a real birth chart before.)

When Sammy gets back to her grandmother’s apartment, Sammy’s grandmother’s nosy neighbor, Mrs. Graybill, tries to find evidence that Sammy is living there against the rules, or Sammy has to pretend like she’s only visiting and leaves to visit a nearby friend, Hudson Graham, an old man who has a lot of books. The two of them talk about other robberies that have happened in the area recently. When Sammy gets back to the apartment, she finds Mrs. Graybill angrily telling her grandmother that Sammy wrote her a threatening note and slipped it under her door. Of course, Sammy didn’t do any such thing. When Sammy sees that the note says, “If you talk, you’ll be sorry,” she knows that the threat is actually from the thief. The thief knew that someone from the apartment building was watching him, but he accidentally delivered the threat to the wrong apartment. With a threatening thief wanting to keep her quiet, Heather and the school principal wanting her butt to suffer at home, the nosy Mrs. Graybill wanting her sent away from her grandmother’s apartment, and the police wanting Sammy at her friend Marissa’s house, Sammy’s witnessing of the theft threatens to expose her own secrets.

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

My Reaction

One of the things that stands out to me is that neither Marissa nor Sammy really live in the best homes. Marissa’s family has a lot more money, and they live in a big house, but her parents are busy business people who spend most of their time working and traveling, often leaving Marissa alone with her younger brother, fending for themselves with Pop Tarts and tv dinners. Marissa feels neglected, and she really is. She also doesn’t have many real friends. A lot of the other kids who play up to her, like Heather, are trying to get her to give them money because they’re aware that her parents give her a lot of spending cash, and Marissa has had trouble saying “no” to them in the past. One of the thing Marissa likes about Sammy is that she’s never asked her for money. Sammy likes Marissa for herself.

Sammy is surprised when she finds out that Marissa actually envies her because her grandmother is always there for her in ways her parents aren’t. Sammy doesn’t feel lucky because, even though her grandmother cares about her, she always lives on the edge, having to pretend like she’s not really living with her grandmother, keeping only a few belongings that are easily hidden, and ducking into a closet to avoid being caught. She can never be completely at home in her grandmother’s apartment because she isn’t supposed to be there at all. Sammy’s mother occasionally calls, but Sammy always feels uncomfortable and neglected by her mother’s abandonment of her, which is why she refers to her as “Lady Lana” instead of as her mother.

I thought at first that Sammy’s housing situation might be solved by the end of the book, but it wasn’t. At the end of the story, she’s still secretly living with her grandmother and lying to the police about being Marissa’s foster sister. However, there are hints in this book about another possible place for Sammy and her grandmother to live in the future, so that situation might change. At no point in the story does anyone mention who Sammy’s father is, where he is, or why he didn’t take Sammy when her mother left. The identity of Sammy’s father is actually an over-arching mystery in this series, something that they discuss later.

As for the book’s introduction of “Rear” Admiral Heather the Butt Poker, the book doesn’t use the phrase “rotten abuser”, but that’s my take on it. Get ready for another one of my anti-bullying rants, or skip the rest of this long paragraph and the next two after that. I always find bullying in books stressful, especially when adults take the side of the young bully. It’s not as bad when a bully is punished or at least called out for their bullying, but when adults refuse to believe the victim, it’s awful. I know from long, bitter experience how the worst, most twisted mean kids provoke fights so their victims end up looking like the bad ones when they finally snap. The abusive kids know that the adults like them and will favor them every time. I’ve seen it happen before, and the fact that situations like this end up in books like this shows that it’s a sadly common experience that many people relate to. The abusers’ behavior never changes because they never experience consequences. The adults delude themselves that the abusers are either “normal” kids or will change (somehow, magically) as they get older and gaslight the victims that the situation is their fault and that it’s possible to be friends with the abuser without the abuser changing their behavior and continuing to act the same mean way they always act. I appreciate that the book shows the unfairness of the situation by adults who just want the situation easily resolved and make the kid they don’t like as well take the brunt of it. I know that Sammy’s use of physical retaliation is what put her in trouble, but honestly, I feel more inclined as an adult to think that sometimes physical force is necessary when dealing with a physical abuser. I’ve never heard of anyone who stopped being physically or emotionally abusive because they were asked politely, and when people in authority refuse to do anything, there sadly isn’t much recourse. Heather should not be touching anyone else’s butt, not with a sharp object, not with her hands, and not with anything else. It’s someone else’s butt. Heather should NOT be touching anyone else’s butt for any reason at all, let alone inflicting pain to someone else’s butt by penetrating it with something sharp. At her age, she should be old enough to understand that sort of thing has connotations other than a kid’s prank, and if she isn’t, someone needs to have a long, serious talk with her to explain why. I know that Heather’s meant to be just a thoughtless mean kid and not molester or something, but she’s still young and someone should put a stop to this before it goes any further. Understanding of these things has to come at some point in a person’s life. If there’s any lesson that’s difficult to carry too far, it’s the concept that no one should mess with someone else’s butt and cause pain. If Heather is allowed to mess with people’s butts in this school, understand that there is absolutely nowhere else in this society where she would be allowed to do that without repercussions. There’s no shame in having some weirdo you don’t even know assault your butt, but there’s a whole world of shame for being that weirdo who can’t leave someone else’s butt alone. Also, Heather jabbed Sammy with something sharp that penetrated her skin. Am I the only adult thinking about tetanus and blood poisoning?

Kids who are bullies in school are more likely to engage in aggressive, anti-social, and criminal behavior in adulthood. Shrugging and saying “Kids will be kids” while doing nothing is one of the worst possible things to do. Bullies don’t magically get better when they hit a certain age. If no one intervenes and teaches them that there are some forms of behavior that are never acceptable and really enforce the rules, they will continue their bullying for the whole rest of their lives, seeing the whole rest of the world as being in the wrong for complaining about their behavior, causing workplace stress, family turmoil, and failed relationships. It’s a serious problem. It’s not harmless. It seems like decades past time for the school vice principal to have this explained to him as well. A school can have all kinds of anti-bullying rules, but if they never enforce them for all parties involved, they’re completely useless because it’s like they don’t even exist at all. Kids are pretty good judges of who’s a pushover and what they can get away with, so anyone who’s worked with them should realize that the only rules that matter are the ones that actually get enforced. Unless the vice principal is one of those grown-up bullies himself who never got a clue and can’t stand to realize the reality about himself, which is always a possibility. I just have no sympathy for that.

I wonder if the vice principal considered how his reaction to what Sammy told him about being jabbed in the butt by a sharp object, actively punishing Sammy for what she said and for her physical retaliation to the violation of her body, might be teaching her some terrible lessons about how to respond to a sexual assault, including the one that people in authority will never believe her and will actively punish her because it’s the easiest thing for them to do and that’s all that matters. That happens quite a lot in real life, as the #MeToo movement has shown. This video, which is rather explicit in its descriptions and not for kids, explains about university officials who act like this vice principal and the harm they do when they let sexual violators go unpunished and even rewarded, while their victims are sent jumping through hoops for justice they never plan to give them because they just want them to shut up, go away, and not make trouble for the bullies they really like. At their core, bullying and sexual violence are both about power and control over other people and using people for the perpetrator’s purpose. It’s not really surprising that there is a connection between the two and that young bullies can turn into perpetrators of sexual violence. I wonder if the vice principal’s response would have been different if it had been a boy who jabbed Sammy’s butt instead of a girl. Actually, I don’t really wonder. I’m sure he would never think of that and would spend a lot more time coming up with reasons why this situation is different is different from any form of sexual assault, so harmless, and how he shouldn’t have to think of it if someone asked him. I liked the part where Sammy offered to show him the mark from the pin if he refused to believe her, an offer the vice principal didn’t accept. I know he’s just taking the easy way out here, punishing the person who didn’t lie and deny throwing a punch and maybe sympathizing with Heather because she got noticeably hurt in a place that isn’t covered by pants and underwear, but as an adult who remembers kids like Heather, I have absolutely no respect for this vice principal for his hard-line punish-the-bullied stance. I don’t feel for Heather at all because she got what she provoked, and there was repeated provocation followed up by a physical attack before Sammy finally broke. Every human on Earth has a breaking point, anyone might snap when pushed too far, and nobody is clever for exploiting someone’s human emotions to the point where they break. Learning that is a valuable life lesson. Of course, I know Heather sticks around as a bully for other books, so she’s not learning a thing.

While Sammy is suspended, Heather and her friend Tenille start a scheme at school to get money from other students by milking their sympathy for her “broken nose” (what they call the “Help Heal Heather Fund”). Of course, her nose isn’t really broken. Sammy realizes it because she’s seen someone with a broken nose before, and the bandaging on Heather’s isn’t right. (The book doesn’t mention it, but people with a broken nose also typically get two black eyes or at least dark, obvious bruises under the eyes from the broken blood vessels. I didn’t know that as a kid, but someone told me about that as an adult, so that’s one of the first things I’d look for.) When Sammy realizes that Heather is faking a broken nose and putting bandages on herself, she figures out how to expose her scheme. She calls the office of the doctor Heather mentioned to someone else, pretending to be Heather, and has the doctor’s office call the vice principal to explain that she doesn’t really need to wear bandages, implying that the vice principal is forcing her to wear them against her will out of an abundance of caution. After the vice principal gets the call from the doctor, who chewed him out for forcing a girl to cover her nose in bandages over just a little nose bleed, he marches into the cafeteria and tells Heather to take her bandages off in front of everyone, exposing her fraud. He tells her that they’re going to have a talk in his office about her lies, and Heather tries to hit Sammy, accidentally hitting the vice principal instead. Heather gets suspended for much longer than Sammy was, and the other students are angry with both her and Tenille for taking their money. The vice principal never apologizes to Sammy for his earlier implication that she was lying and for making her sit in that little closet called “the Box” to think about it, but her reputation is restored at school.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mansion of Secrets

Kay Tracey

The Mansion of Secrets by Frances K. Judd, 1951, 1980.

Kay’s cousin, Bill, is relieved when he finds a buyer for the old Greeley mansion. The former owner, Manuel Greeley, was an elderly man who passed away without leaving a will. As a lawyer, Bill was put in charge of trying to find the nearest Greeley relative as heir, who turned out to be a distant nephew of Manuel’s. The nephew isn’t interested in keeping the house for himself because he’s an airplane pilot and spends most of his time traveling, so he asked Bill to sell it on his behalf. It’s not a particularly desirable property because it’s a few miles outside of town and rather isolated. There’s also a local rumor that the place is haunted and that there’s a treasure hidden somewhere on the property, earning it the nickname “Mansion of Secrets.” The man who says he wants to buy the mansion, Clarence Cody, is from another state, Wyoming, and he doesn’t care about the isolated nature of the house because he wants to turn the place into a resort and riding school. The mansion would be an idea location because it already has stables and pastures on the property.

Kay is still fascinated by the stories of ghosts and treasure she’s heard about the house and asks Bill if she and some friends could take a look around the place before he completes the sale. She’s always wondered what it was like inside, and she thinks this might be her last chance to find out. Bill decides that the request is harmless enough, lends her the key to the house, and tells Kay that she and her friends can go out to the property and take down the “For Sale” sign for him. He doesn’t expect that Kay and her friends are really going to find any ghosts or treasure.

However, when Kay and her friends go out to the old mansion, they spot a strange woman on the property. This strange woman uses some tools to pry up one of the boards of the stairway and seems to find something hidden under the step, but she becomes frightened and runs away when she realizes that Kay and her friends are there. When the girls try to run after her, she gets away from them.

Then, a man shows up and introduces himself as Peter Greeley, Manuel’s grandnephew. He says that he just came to take some of the pictures from the walls of the house. The girls ask him if the stories about treasure in the house are true, but Peter says he doesn’t think so. He admits that he’s searched the house himself to see if he could find anything, but he never has, so he thinks that it’s just a story.

The girls investigate the steps where the mysterious woman was searching and discover another step with something hidden inside. The papers they find turn out to be blueprints of the house, and there are several spots marked with red ‘X’s and labeled “IMPORTANT.” Two of the ‘X’s represent the step where the woman was searching and the step where the girls found the blueprints, so the girls figure out that the other ‘X’s are also secret hiding places. The girls decide to try checking another one to see what they find, and they discover a hidden panel that holds diamond jewelry! The girls realize that they need to tell Bill and Peter immediately because this treasure and anything else hidden in the house legally belong to Peter, and he should claim it before moving forward with selling the house.

When they show the diamond jewelry to Bill, he takes it to the bank for safe keeping, and he goes out to the house with the girls to check out the other hiding places marked on the blueprints. They split up to search different spots, and Kay’s friends discover some antique Bibles that are valuable collectors’ items. Kay decides to consult the blueprints again, but someone stole them while everyone was looking at the Bible! Realizing that the thief could be hiding somewhere in the house, Bill decides to search, but the thief knocks him down and runs away. They don’t know who it was except that it was a man wearing a mask. Bill decides that the only thing to do is to call Peter Greeley and arrange for someone to guard the house.

They don’t know who either the man or the woman sneaking around the house are, but somehow, both of them seem to know something about what Manuel Greeley was hiding in his house and even where some of it was hidden. With Clarence Cody pressing to finalize the sale of the property, Bill, Kay, and their friends try to find the other stashes of hidden treasures in the house before anyone else can steal them.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. That copy is one of the older versions, where Kay’s friend “Wendy” is still called “Wilma”, and her nemesis at school is called “Ethel” instead of “Chris.” Those names changed in later printings of the stories. It also shows the girls with their true hair colors on the cover, something which most other books in the series don’t do. Kay is supposed to have brown hair, Betty is blonde, and Wendy/Wilma has dark hair (I think they usually just say “dark”, implying dark brown or black hair).

My Reaction and Spoilers

Spooky old houses with secret hiding places and hidden rooms are classics in children’s literature, and it’s fun in this book to see them find various kinds of valuable objects hidden in this house by its eccentric former owner. I have to admit that the hidden room of animal trophies was more creepy for me than it was for the characters in the story. I’m an animal lover, and I would not be happy to find myself in a room with deceased animals staring at me reproachfully from the walls. The last thing on my mind at that point would be figuring out how much they were worth. It’s also a bit coincidental that one of Manuel’s “treasures” turns out to be a valuable jar of ambergris, a key ingredient in perfumes, when Kay accidentally broke a jar of the stuff on a class trip to a perfume factory.

Of course, Kay breaking the jar wasn’t actually her fault but that of her school nemesis, who bumped into her on purpose and made her drop it. Kay is one of those characters who seems a little too perfect at everything she does, and even her missteps are often someone else’s fault. I don’t hate Kay, but I have to admit that I’d prefer her being a little more realistic as a human character. Minor klutziness that wasn’t someone else’s fault wouldn’t be a bad characteristic for her to have. There is only one minor flaw that I’ve seen in Kay, which is occasional impatience. Her impatience is only very minor and never enough to seriously interfere with her investigations, but it does appear in this book, toward the end.

Even though they mention rumors of the house being haunted early in the story, there was never a point where the characters really thought that there were ghosts in the house or had to come to the realization that strange things happening were caused by humans instead of ghosts. They knew right from the beginning that there were real humans lurking around the house, looking for hidden treasures. Between the two people initially caught sneaking around the old house, looking for things, the man is more sinister than the woman, and he becomes the repeat visitor. It turns out that the woman used to work for Manuel Greeley and she was searching under one of the steps because Manuel told her to do that if her wages weren’t completely paid by the time he died. When Kay learns the reason why she was searching in the house, her situation is easily resolved.

In many Kay Tracey books, the mystery is less about who the villains are than where they’re hiding and how to catch them. What I mean is that the Kay Tracey mysteries are generally not the kind of mystery book where you have maybe five or six main suspects for committing a crime and the story is about figuring out which of them did it. Instead, the villains and criminals are typically people Kay and her friends have never met or seen before in their lives. In this case, they figure out that they’ve seen the man sneaking around the old mansion before in advertisements because his main career is being a model. It doesn’t take too long to find out his name (at least his professional name) by tracing the advertisements back to an agency, but tracking him down is harder. They eventually catch him when he returns to the mansion but the more mysterious part is how he knew about the mansion’s treasures and the secret hiding places marked on the blueprints. Kay eventually realizes that the man doesn’t have a connection to old Manuel Greeley but to the architect who designed his house. In a rare display of imperfection, Kay almost misses the key clue to the relationship because she gets impatient with the woman who is telling her about the architect and his family.

Posted on by TracyC

The Double Disguise

Kay Tracey

The Double Disguise by Frances K. Judd (Stratemeyer Syndicate), 1952 (revised from 1941 edition), 1980.

Kay and her friends, Betty and Wendy, stop to help a woman who was knocked down at the train station. As they help the woman up, a man who claims to be the woman’s son picks up the woman’s suitcase and takes her purse away from Kay. However, the man is not the woman’s son and runs away with her things while Kay and the other girls focus on the woman. The woman, Alice Janey, is very distressed when she finds out that she’s been robbed, and Kay invites her to come stay at her house with her mother and cousin, who is a lawyer, while the police try to find her missing belongings.

The invitation to stay at the Tracey house turns out to be fortuitous because Alice Janey is actually an old friend of Kay’s mother, Kathryn. Kathryn Tracey tells Miss Janey that she’s sure Kay and her friends can help her because they’ve solved mysteries before. (Even though my copy of the book numbers this as the first book in the series, when the series was published for the first time, it was much further along in the series. The order of the books was changed in different reprintings, so the girls have had other adventures before this.) Miss Janey used to live in their town, Brantwood, and she has now returned in order to finish some work that her late father was doing. Her father’s old papers were in the suitcase that was stolen. Miss Janey thinks that the person who stole her suitcase was after those papers.

The next day, Kay takes Miss Janey to the house that she’s purchased on the edge of town, but the house is somewhat lonely and isolated. Miss Janey is a bit nervous about being there alone, so she asks Kay if she’s willing to stay with her until she can get a housekeeper. During the night, Kay wakes up because she hears voices, and she discovers Miss Janey talking to a woman who looks like a witch and seems to be some kind of medium or fortune-teller, telling her where to find her missing suitcase and purse. The next day, Miss Janey claims that she a dream about where to look for the purse and suitcase, not saying anything about the witch woman. Kay knows that Miss Janey is hiding something, but she’s not sure why.

When Miss Janey goes to the empty old house that the witch woman described as the place where she would find her bags, Kay and her friends follow her. The bags are there, but they’re empty. Miss Janey disappears, apparently taken away by a couple of men, and she later turns up at her own house.

As Kay befriends Miss Janey, Miss Janey opens up to her and explains a few things. She admits to Kay that she’s been consulting with the fortune teller, Nanna, for some time. Although Kay is suspicious of Nanna, Miss Janey trusts her. Miss Janey also explains that she used to help her late father in his chemical research and that she now has a laboratory set up in her house. Specifically, she’s trying to finish a formula that her father started working on for a substance that is like glass but which has more uses. She was carrying the formula in her bags when they were stolen, and that’s what the thief must have wanted. This technological development would be very valuable, at least when it’s finished, and the thieves might not have realized that the formula was incomplete.

The situation becomes more complicated when Kay discovers that the men who removed Miss Janey from the old house before are detectives who are investigating her because they suspect her of participating in a fraud that has robbed widows of their money. Kay knows that Miss Janey would never take part in such a thing, but this fraud has a connection to the theft of Miss Janey’s formula.

My Reaction

I found this book rather meandering and disjointed. It started off with a pretty strong premise – a lady has her bags stolen at a train station, and it turns out that she’s carrying an unfinished chemical formula that may be worth a lot of money once it’s finished. The fact that the formula is incomplete adds a complication to the story. Are the people who stole the formula capable of completing it on their own or will they have to trick or force the original owner to finish it for them?

Then, the plot is further complicated by a mysterious fortune teller who turns out to own the house where she told the lady her bags would be found. Is she in the plot to steal the formula? There’s a pretty case for it because it would explain how she seems to know things that she shouldn’t know otherwise, and also it turns out that the thieves have actually been renting her house and using it as a base for their plots without her knowledge, so that plot angle doesn’t really go anywhere in the end.

But, then, the plot is further complicated by a couple of detectives who suspect Miss Janey of being part of a fraud to steal money from widows. A widow’s son is briefly arrested breaking and entering because he entered the mysterious old house for his mother’s money, while various other people have entered and left that same old house with no complaints from anyone. Kay and her friend Ronald see a couple of men at the house who dress as women, and realizing that they must be part of the fraud, try to turn them over to the police only for them to drag Kay with them as a hostage when they go rob a train like bandits from a old western movie, resulting in her being temporarily accused of being their accomplice. Then, a vial marked “POISON” (not any specific poison, mind you, just “POISON” – why a chemist would have something with such a vague label is beyond me) is stolen from Miss Janey’s laboratory and ends up in the hands of the widow’s son. However, they don’t really explain why he had it or what he meant to do with it, he doesn’t use it on anybody, and he tells Kay that the fortune teller make him hand it over to her before Kay even reaches him, so that plot point doesn’t go anywhere, either. All the while, the school mean girl and Kay’s nemesis, Chris Eaton, competes with her to solve the mystery in a vague sort of way and spreads various wild rumors about her at various times that don’t really do anything and also don’t really go anywhere but provide temporary distractions from the plot.

Why would people who steal chemical formulas and have the connections to sell them also perpetrate financial frauds targeting widows and also rob trains? This criminal group is quite diversified. The book also has the criminals speaking a foreign language at times because, with such diversified skills, why wouldn’t they also be from some exotic foreign country? It never even leads anywhere. At first, I thought that they were setting it up for the thieves to also be spies, but that is also never explained and doesn’t go anywhere. The “double disguise” part of the story is that the two thieves are men who also periodically disguise themselves as women, but Kay actually sees them putting on their disguises at one point, so that isn’t a plot twist for very long.

The scene with the sleigh crash happens toward the end of the book, and they get one of the thieves from the wreckage. Kay locates the thieves’ apartment and finds the items they stole there, but she doesn’t get the other thief herself. The other thief gets away from her, and a detective just tells her that they caught him at the hospital, visiting his partner in crime. The end. It ends happily, but it was a confusing ride with a lot of points that didn’t really go anywhere along the way.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Hester Bidgood

Hester Bidgood, Investigatrix of Evill Deedes by E.W. Hildick, 1994.

Hester Bidgood was a character in one of the McGurk fantasy mysteries, which involved time travel, and in this book, she investigates a mystery of her own in her own time, the late 1600s, Colonial America.

Goody Willson’s cat has been found, badly injured, with the shape of a cross burned into it. Some people are spreading the rumor that this is a sign that Goody Willson is a witch and that the injuries to the cat were a sign of God’s disapproval for Goody Willson’s “witchy ways.” Of course, Hester and her friend, Rob, don’t believe that. Old Mistress Brown worries that if the witch rumors go too far, everyone will soon be a potential witch suspect, like in Salem. Rob takes care of nursing the cat back to health, while he and Hester try to determine how the cat came to be injured in such a strange manner.

Rob knows what it’s like to be an outcast. Although he’s a white boy, he lived for a time among the Native Americans as a young captive and adopted many of their habits. He doesn’t know how to read, and Hester has been helping him. However, there are people in the community who don’t trust Rob because of his connections to the American Indians, and they call him derogatory names.

Hester and Rob consider that the mark on the cat could have been made by a branding iron. They go to the blacksmith and ask him if he has an x-shaped branding iron or if anyone has asked him to make one, but he says no. But, then Hester begins to consider that maybe the cross isn’t really a cross. A cross sign could also be made by putting two capital ‘T’s together at an angle.

Their investigations also take them to the old Morton homestead, where the entire Morton family was killed by American Indians some years before. Someone has been staying there in secret, and there are signs of blood, possibly from the injured cat. Gradually, Hester and Rob begin to put the pieces together, realizing who the person responsible must be and how this evil deed is actually connected to an earlier crime.

I didn’t really like this book because of the cruelty to animals. It wasn’t just what was done to the cat but also when Hester remembers Rob finding a dragonfly and considering taking off its wings. Hester stops him from doing it, but it’s still a disgusting thought. I thought that the villain was pretty obvious from the beginning, too, although I didn’t know the motive. When there’s a witch hunt, the person who is the most guilty is the first one to bring up the subject of witches.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mystery of the Cupboard

The Mystery of the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, 1993.

This is the fourth book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. It’s also the longest book in the series and the one that reveals the most about the history of the magical key and cupboard and how their secrets tie into the secrets in Omri’s own family. It was my favorite book in the series when I was a kid!

Omri’s parents have surprised him by telling him that they’re planning on moving to a new house again. Omri wasn’t exactly happy with their last move, and his room and other parts of their new house were damaged after his last adventure with time travel, when his friend Patrick brought back a tornado with him. However, now that the house has been repaired and he’s settled in, Omri doesn’t like the idea of having to pack up and leave and get used to a new place again. His parents want to move to the country, but it’s not even the area where Patrick now lives. Instead, they’re planning to move to a house that his mother has just inherited.

The house Omri’s mother has inherited belonged to an older cousin of hers she never actually knew. He didn’t leave his house specifically to her; it’s just that he died and left no will, and Omri’s mother happens to be the nearest living relative his lawyers could find. When they finally see the house and find out how much land is attached to it, it turns out to be much better than Omri expected.

There are just two things that concern Omri. The first is the package that he asked his father to store at a bank for him – the magical cupboard and key. Although Omri asked his father to put them in a bank deposit box to keep them safe and prevent himself from being tempted to use them again because it’s too dangerous, he doesn’t like the idea of them being too far away from where he’s living. His father promises to have them transferred to a bank near their new home. The second thing that worries him is that his cat mysteriously disappears soon after they move into the new house. (The cat is okay, she just sneaked away to have kittens.) His parents say that she’s just roaming her new territory and might be a little angry for being moved from her old home and that she’ll come back to Omri once she’s settled in, he still worries about her.

One night, he think he hears his cat crying and goes looking for her. He doesn’t see her, but he stumbles on something that was hidden in some old thatch that fell of the roof of the house. It turns out to be a metal box and a notebook belonging to someone named Jessica Charlotte Driscoll, written in 1950. Omri doesn’t know who she is, but the notebook is a story of her life, in which she describes incredible things happening to her which her family doesn’t believe. Omri wonders if she could be a relative of his, and the name Charlotte reminds him of his grandmother, Lottie. He never knew his grandmother and his mother doesn’t even remember her mother because she died in a bombing during WWII, when she was very young. The woman who wrote the notebook couldn’t have actually been his grandmother because she would have been dead for several years by 1950, but perhaps it was a family name.

Omri questions his mother about the cousin who owned the house and her family’s history. Jessica Charlotte turns out to be the sister of Omri’s great-grandmother, his mother’s great-aunt. Great Aunt Jessica Charlotte was the younger sister of his mother’s grandmother. After her mother was killed in the war, Omri’s mother was raised by her grandmother. Omri’s mother had asked her about her younger sister when she was a girl, but her grandmother didn’t like to talk about her. Apparently, Jessica Charlotte had been an actress with a somewhat scandalous past. However, the cousin who used to own this house was Jessica Charlotte’s son, Frederick. Frederick never married, and although Omri’s mother thought that Jessica Charlotte had lived abroad somewhere, it’s possible that she lived at this house for a time.

Much of the story is told through entries in Jessica Charlotte’s notebook. When Omri begins to read the notebook, written toward the end of Jessica Charlotte’s life, he learns, to his shock, that Jessica Charlotte was the original owner of the magic cupboard and that she had her own Little People who visited her from other times and were her friends. After Omri reads that, he questions Gillon, the brother who gave him the cupboard, and he admits that he didn’t really find it in an alley, like he said. He actually found it in the basement of their old house with a bunch of other junk. He just didn’t have the money to buy Omri a birthday present at the time, and Omri had kind of a fascination for secret drawers and boxes, so Gillon thought that he might have some fun with the old cupboard, and he made up the story about mysteriously finding it to make it more interesting. (I suspect that the author was just retconning this part to make it agree with the idea that the cupboard was passed down through Omri’s family, but I like the way this comes out, so I’m okay with that.)

The notebook further explains that Jessica Charlotte had been envious of her older sister because she was prettier, luckier, and often seemed favored by everyone. However, in mocking the young men who came to court her older sister, Jessica Charlotte discovered that she had a talent for mimicry, which led her to become an actress, although her family thought that it was a disreputable profession and disapproved. Jessica Charlotte also discovered that she was psychic and sometimes had visions of the future. She eventually left home and became an actress. Her sister, Maria, still visited her secretly sometimes, against their parents’ wishes.

After awhile, Jessica Charlotte became pregnant with Frederick, which was when she first came to the old house where Omri’s family now lives. She didn’t have any money and couldn’t work while pregnant, and because she was unmarried, she would have been considered shameful if people knew. At that time, the house was a farmhouse belonging to a relative of Frederick’s father. By that point, Jessica Charlotte realized that her boyfriend wasn’t a good person and wasn’t going to be a good father to their son, but he did arrange for this relative of his to help her through her pregnancy. Frederick was born in the house, and because he was illegitimate and sensed his mother’s complicated feelings about him and the circumstances of his birth, he and his mother were never as close as they really should have been.

Meanwhile, Maria got married and had a daughter, Lottie, who was Omri’s grandmother, the one who was killed in the war. Jessica Charlotte says that she did something that wronged Maria and Lottie, and Omri stops reading the diary for a time, but he decides that he really has to continue and know the full story.

Over the years, Jessica Charlotte lived a hard life, supporting Frederick through a mixture of acting and other odd jobs, including fortune telling because of her psychic abilities (although she never used her gift to see into the future for herself or anyone close to her because she was afraid she might see something bad happen to them and be unable to stop it). Meanwhile, Maria was living a very comfortable life with her husband and daughter. Even after their parents died, Maria still had Jessica Charlotte visit secretly because of her tainted reputation, and she never wanted to meet Frederick or talk about him because his birth was the cause of her sister’s scandal. Still, Jessica Charlotte continued to see her sister and became fond of Lottie.

However, Maria was basically a pampered snob who didn’t understand her sister’s life and hardships and also had a streak of self-centeredness. One day, when Lottie was a young child, Maria said that when Lottie was older, she didn’t want her to see so much of her aunt, implying that Jessica Charlotte would be a bad influence on her. Jessica Charlotte was deeply offended by that, but she was also fearful about losing the last family members who were still speaking to her. She had lost so many of her other relationships that she still felt the need to be close to Maria and Lottie as much as she could and visit their pampered and comfortable little world, enjoying occasional tastes of their happier and more comfortable lives.

Yet, Jessica Charlotte’s jealousy for Maria’s pampered life and anger at her callousness continued to eat at her. One day, when Maria was showing her all of her nice jewelry, Jessica Charlotte got the urge to steal a beautiful pair of earrings. First, Maria was being, at the very least, thoughtless and callous for showing off all of her nice jewelry to her much poorer sister, who could never have things like that herself. Maria not only had no concept about what her sister’s life was like outside of her occasional visits, but she purposely never asked her about how she was doing, how her son was doing, or even where they were living, how they were getting by, if they needed anything, or if she could help them in any way. She didn’t know because she didn’t want to know any of these things, and the fact that she didn’t want to know any of that indicates that she knew enough to understand that their circumstances weren’t pleasant. To show off all of her pretty things like that just seems like rubbing it in. Second, Jessica Charlotte had been in need for so long that she saw all of the pretty jewels as symbols of Maria’s comfortable life, something she hungered for herself. The pair of earrings weren’t something that Jessica Charlotte wanted just for the sake of having them but because of what they represented to her, the life that she couldn’t share in and which she knew that Maria would soon shut her out of when she declared that her visits with her young niece would have to stop soon.

Jessica Charlotte planned out the theft in advance, making a duplicate key for her sister’s jewelry box and thinking that her sister would just assume that she’d mislaid that one pair of earrings somewhere. Unfortunately, when Maria noticed that the earrings were gone, she thought Lottie had done something with them, and when she kept insisting that Lottie tell her where they were, Lottie got upset and ran out of the house into the street. Matt, Maria’s husband and Lottie’s father, chased after her and was hit by a cab and killed. Jessica Charlotte felt terrible when she heard the news because she hadn’t meant for anyone to get hurt, but there was nothing she could do to take it all back.

Omri knows how Maria and Lottie’s lives went after that point because of what his mother told him about their family history. After Matt died, Maria and Lottie didn’t have very much money to live on, just a little pension, and then their house was burgled, and many of Maria’s nice things were stolen, including the rest of her jewelry, so she couldn’t sell them for extra money. Maria had to move to smaller, cheaper lodgings and get a job for the first time in her life in order to support herself and her daughter, living a life closer to what her sister had been doing. When Lottie was grown and married, she and her husband helped to support her mother, but after they were killed in WWII, Maria took in Lottie’s daughter (Omri’s mother) and had to keep working in order to raise her. Although they were now living in more equal circumstances, the two sisters did not become close again because of Jessica Charlotte’s guilt about what she’d done. Jessica Charlotte ended up buying the old house in the country where her son had been born and told her sister that she was going to live abroad, never telling her exactly where. She had not expected to see Maria again anyway since Maria was planning to cut her out of her daughter’s life before Jessica Charlotte stole the earrings, and after Matt died, Jessica Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to face Maria. Jessica Charlotte lived in the country house until her death in 1950.

When Jessica Charlotte became too weak to write any longer, shortly before her death, she had Frederick finish the story in the notebook. Aside from the difficult feelings between Frederick and his mother because of the circumstances of his birth and the rough and poor childhood he endured, Frederick also says that the two of them don’t really get along because they are very different types of people. When he was grown, Frederick went into business as a metal smith, eventually owning his own factory that made toy soldiers and other metal toys. During WWII, the government had him convert his toy factory to manufacture munitions. He wasn’t happy about it, but it did make him fairly well-off. After the war, Frederick had hoped to go back to making metal toys, but plastic was coming into vogue as the material of choice for toys, and Frederick couldn’t stand the stuff. He thought that the newer plastic toys were cheap and shoddy compared to his detailed works of art in metal. (It was kind of true.) There were basically two choices before Frederick: convert to making the cheap plastic toys he hated or switch to making different types of metal products. He switched to making metal boxes and cabinets.

Frederick never really believed in his mother’s supposed psychic powers, but when he was upset about plastic ruining his metal toy business, he admits that he let his mother talk him into participating in a silly ritual. He was so angry and upset that his emotions were ruining his health, so his mother told him to build something to put his feelings into and shut them away. Frederick built Omri’s magical metal cupboard. When he was finished making it, his mother had him visualize cleansing himself of all of his anger and hatred of plastic and shutting that feeling away in the cupboard. To his surprise, his mother shut and locked the cupboard with a different key from the one that he’d made to put in the cupboard’s lock (her key to her sister’s jewelry box). He thought that this ritual was kind of crazy at first, but he did feel better after he did it. He felt weak for a time, but then he recovered. He still didn’t like plastic, but not to the point where it harmed his health anymore.

Jessica Charlotte had said her son had also inherited her psychic “gift”, even though he didn’t believe in it. Apparently, his strong feelings about plastic produced a kind of magic spell or curse that affected the key and the cupboard and created the effect of bringing plastic toys to life. Jessica Charlotte discovered this herself because her son had given her a set of plastic figures in order to demonstrate to her how these little figures were inferior to his metal ones. Jessica Charlotte put them in the cupboard and brought them to life, and these little friends of hers brought her some happiness in her final days. Frederick thought that her mother was imagining that she was talking to fairies or something and never found out about his mother’s little friends or the magic of the cupboard.

When Jessica Charlotte realized that she was dying, she used the cupboard to send her little friends back to their own time periods, except for one little maid named Jenny, who refused to go back because she’d had a terrible life in her own time. Instead of making her go back, Jessica Charlotte confided in one of the workmen fixing the thatch on her roof and gave Jenny to him. This man, Tom, was lonely because his wife left him for someone else, so Jenny was good company for him for many years, until one day, she simply turned back to plastic suddenly. When Omri finds Tom as an old man and introduces himself as Jessica Charlotte’s distant nephew, Tom explains all of this to him, saying that all he can think of is that Jenny’s physical body must have died in her own time after having been in an apparent coma for years. He buried her little plastic figure respectfully. Tom is also the one who sent the cupboard and key to Maria after Jessica Charlotte died along with a note dictated to him by Jessica Charlotte, hinting at the nature of the cupboard and key and tacitly admitting to the theft of the earrings, so Maria knew the truth of the theft before her own death.

Omri comes to realize that the metal box that Jessica Charlotte left behind, and which was sealed with wax, must contain her collection of little figures. When his friend, Patrick, comes to visit him at his new house, Omri explains the whole situation to him, and Patrick suggests that Omri’s magic key will probably open this metal box, too. Of course, he also points out that if Omri opens the box with that special key, it will bring the figures inside to life, just as it has with the cupboard and Omri’s old trunk. Omri sees Jessica Charlotte’s old figurines as a way of finishing her story and feels compelled to bring them back to life one last time, although he knows that bringing figures to life always comes with complications, and he will have no way of knowing who or what the figures are until the box is open.

When Omri gets the chance to talk to Jessica Charlotte’s little friends, he not only learns more about his great-great-aunt’s past and the history of the cupboard but also sees an opportunity to change the past of his mother and great-grandmother by preventing the robbery that made them poor. But, if he meddles in the past, what will that mean for his future?

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

My Reaction:

This is my favorite book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. I suspect that the author of the series didn’t originally have an explanation for why the cupboard and key were magic, but that’s just a guess on my part. The explanation behind the magic in this book makes sense, and those parts that didn’t quite mesh with the earlier books (like Omri’s brother’s original explanation of finding the cupboard in an alley) were briefly explained. Sometimes, when book or movie series try to explain something magical or a mysterious secret they’ve left hanging, it turns into a let-down because the explanation feels rushed or implausible or fits clumsily into the earlier parts of the story, but this one was pretty smooth, intriguing, and also opened up some new story possibilities.

In previous books, Omri and Patrick both did impulsive things with the cupboard that put their small friends, themselves, and other people in danger, but in this book, both of the boys seem to have matured. Although Patrick thinks of Jessica Charlotte as a bad person and a thief for stealing her sister’s earrings, Omri tries to explain to him that she was a much more complex and conflicted person than that. Yes, Jessica Charlotte was a thief, but her motives were beyond mere greed, and it wasn’t long before she regretted what she’d done and the lasting hurt that she’d caused her family. In considering Jessica Charlotte’s theft and the theft that the burglar who was one of Jessica Charlotte’s little friends later committed against Maria, partly out of personal greed and partly as retribution against Maria on Jessica Charlotte’s behalf, Omri and his mother both come to terms with their family’s history. Patrick, who in previous books had been the more impulsive one when he and Omri interacted with the little people from the past, acts as a restraining influence in this book when Omri is tempted to change his family’s past for the better by preventing the thefts that left his great-grandmother without money. Patrick is the one who makes it clear to Omri that, just as Jessica Charlotte’s theft of a single pair of earrings radically changed the lives of her sister and niece, if Omri tries to stop those events from happening, he might change his family’s past so much that he might accidentally prevent himself or even his own mother from being born in the first place. After Omri tells the thief to give back the jewel box he stole, Omri worries that he’s gone too far, but it turns out that one request was actually fated to happen, just as it turns out that Jessica Charlotte later realized that she had met Omri briefly in what she thought was a dream when he brought her plastic figure to life. Not all of Omri’s “meddling” with the past was really meddling but was actually part of what was fated to happen and has already had an effect on the past even before he knew it.

At the end of this book, something that Omri has alternately dreaded and wanted to happen: his father discovers the secret of the cupboard and meets Omri’s small friends. In books, there is usually this assumption that if parents ever find out about their children’s magical adventures, they will end because the parents will put a stop to them or somehow, the magic will be ruined. However, in this case, the magic is not ruined, and there is one more book in this series where both Omri and his father take part in the magic.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Melted Diamonds

Mystery of the Melted Diamonds by Carol Farley, 1986.

This is the last book in the Kipper and Larry mystery series.

This time, Larry has come to visit Kipper and his family on their farm in Kansas while his father attends a police convention in Florida and will be spending Christmas with them. At first, Kipper thinks that Larry probably regrets this visit because Kansas isn’t very exciting, and it’s snowing while Larry’s father is in sunny Florida.

The situation gets worse when Kipper gets into a fight with his friend Scooter when Larry and Kipper were supposed to be spending the night at Scooter’s house. Scooter apparently cheated at a game, and Kipper got so mad that he said that he and Larry would just go home. The problem is that the boys have to walk a couple of miles to reach the farm where Kipper’s family lives, and the snow has turned into a blizzard.

The boys start to get scared that they might freeze to death when Larry spots a light from a house nearby and heads toward it. Kipper thinks that it’s a dangerous mistake because the house with the light is the old Morgansterne house, and it’s been empty for years. However, when the boys reach the house, there are oil lanterns burning in the windows and a fire in a wood-burning stove. Out of desperation, the boys let themselves into the house to warm up, but then they start to wonder who lit the fire and the lanterns. They search the house to see if there’s anyone there, but they don’t find anyone. The only thing they find upstairs is an old box of Christmas ornaments.

The boys spend the rest of the night in the house without seeing anyone and continue to the farm in the morning. When they explain to Kipper’s mother what happened and where they spent the night, she’s concerned, both because the boys were out in the snowstorm and because nobody should be in the old Morgansterne house. Old Miss Morgansterne, who owns the house, has been living in a retirement home, and no one else is supposed to be there. Kipper’s mother decides to call the sheriff and have him look into it.

The sheriff comes and questions the boys about what they saw in the house, and they ask him about a robbery at a jewelry store in town that the family heard about on the radio while waiting for him to arrive. Larry wonders if there’s a connection between the robbery and the supposedly empty house that seemed to be occupied by someone before they arrived. The sheriff doesn’t see why there would be a connection between the two events, but Kipper’s younger brothers think that maybe the robbers were in the house the whole time, hiding in some kind of secret passageway, like in books and movies. The sheriff thinks that the boys have overactive imaginations.

However, there is more to the theory that the house and the robbery are connected than the sheriff thinks. Soon, the sheriff is alerted that the car that is believed to belong to the robbers has crashed into a pond near a dangerous curve in the road and the two men inside the car are dead. When they search the car, they find some of the jewelry from the robbery, the less expensive costume jewelry, so it seems that they were correct that these men were the robbers, but strangely, the most expensive jewels from the robbery, diamonds, are still missing. The sheriff says that it’s almost like they melted away, like the diamond-like snow that Larry commented on earlier.

It makes sense to the boys that the robbers were in the Morgansterne house before they were. They remember seeing a car like the robbers’ car along that road before the snow storm got bad, and it would explain why the house was empty all that night. The robbers accidentally saved the boys’ lives by lighting the stove in the house for them, but they never returned to their hideout in the empty house because they had their car accident. But, somewhere along the way, the diamonds they stole seem to have vanished. Can the boys figure out how?

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

My Reaction

Overall, I liked the story. I had more than one theory about where the diamonds were, and one of them turned out to be correct, but there was enough doubt in my mind to keep the story interesting until the end.

Posted on by TracyC

Mystery of the Fog Man

Mystery of the Fog Man by Carol Farley, 1966.

This is the first book of the Kipper and Larry mystery series. Kipper (real name Christopher) and Larry are 13-year-old cousins. The two boys meet each other for the first time in this book, when Kipper comes to visit Larry and his family in Michigan. The boys had written letters to each other before, but they were both excited to finally meet in person.

Larry and his father live in Ludington, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and Larry takes Kipper fishing soon after he arrives, which is when Kipper first encounters the mysterious figure known only as The Fog Man. This strange old man starts Kipper, and Kipper finds him eerie. Larry explains to Kipper that The Fog Man is kind of a local eccentric. He is apparently both deaf and mute. No one knows his real name. He apparently lives in the nearby forest, but during the summer, he comes to the beach to collect driftwood, which he sells to tourists, who are fascinated by this eccentric old man, and to the lady who runs the nearby gift shop, Miss Norton.

Shortly after this encounter, the boys learn that someone has stolen thousands of dollars from the safe on one of the car ferries that travel back and forth across Lake Michigan and Wisconsin. (Another book by the same author but in a different series takes place on one of these car ferries, The Case of the Vanishing Villain.) Kipper and Larry are able to see the scene of the robbery because of Larry’s father’s position as the local chief of police. However, the boys’ adventures are just beginning.

The most likely suspect in the robbery seems to be a man called Karminsky, who worked on the ferry. He disappeared around the time of the robbery, and Larry’s father thinks that he’s hiding out somewhere in the area, waiting for the police to stop looking for him so he can make his getaway. Larry is intrigued by the idea that the robber might be hiding out in the woods nearby. Although his father forbids the boys to go looking for the robber, they can’t resist checking out the woods anyway.

Larry confides in Kipper that he really wants to help his father catch this robber so that his father will be a big success and get public recognition. Larry sometimes feels bad that he and his father have been alone since his mother died when he was young. He thinks that, if his mother was still alive to help his father take care of him, his father would be able to do much more in his life and career, so Larry wants to be the help that he thinks his father really needs.

Soon, the boys think that they’ve found Karminsky’s hideout in the woods, but even though they lie in wait for him all night, they don’t manage to catch him there. The only person they see in the area is the Fog Man, and to Kipper’s shock, he sees the Fog Man walking without his characteristic limp!

When the boys later find the Fog Man’s coat and a fake white beard, they reach different conclusions about what happened. Kipper thinks that the Fog Man was involved in the robbery all along and that he was always in disguise from the beginning. However, Larry is accustomed to thinking of the Fog Man as a harmless old eccentric who has hung around town for the last few years, selling driftwood to tourists. Larry thinks that the Fog Man might be an innocent victim of Karminsky’s, that Karminsky may have killed him so he could take his place and blend in with the usual beach scene until he could make his escape.

Then, Larry’s father tells them that Karminsky has been found in another town, apparently having missed being on the ferry in the first place. So, if Karminsky was never on the ferry and never in Ludington, who stole the money and masqueraded as the Fog Man?

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

My Reaction

I bought this book because I always liked the Flee Jay and Clarice mystery story that I mentioned before and wanted to see more by the same author. I liked it because, while I thought that I understood things pretty quickly in the story, there are some surprising twists to the mystery. I thought that I had it figured out twice, but I was surprised both times, and the true identity of the Fog Man remains a mystery until the very end.