The Mystery of a Hansom Cab

Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab was hugely popular in, like, 1887, but I’m not quite sure why. I mean, I didn’t figure out who the murderer was, sure, but I felt like Hume’s attempts at misdirection were more important to him than the integrity of the plot. Trying to figure out the solution isn’t a huge part of reading mystery novels, for me, but I like to at least have the option, and I think lying to the reader is the ultimate sin a mystery writer can commit.

Also, the crime wasn’t that exciting.

The Telegraph Boy

So, I have this New York Book Company edition of Horatio Alger’s The Telegraph Boy. I think I got it at The Book Barn more than a year ago. Anyway, it’s been sitting on a shelf on my family’s house upstate for kind of a while, because I compulsively buy Alger books and forget to read them. This past weekend, though, I forgot my Kindle at a 4th of July party and ended up being without it for, um…twenty hours? Which resulted in me reading a couple of actual physical books that I wouldn’t have read otherwise, one of which was The Telegraph Boy.

(I recognize that I am overly attached to my Kindle. I may actually be as attached to it as my brother once was to his Gameboy Color, which is saying a lot. I feel bad about this, because I really do love actual paper books, especially when they’re old and the pages are turning brown and they smell kind of weird.)

Anyway, the point of this post is that I rarely finish an Alger book and think to myself, that was really good. In fact, I’m not sure that’s ever happened before, and I love Alger more than the vast majority of people, I think. I don’t know what made The Telegraph Boy work so well for me, but here are some guesses:

A World of Girls, by L.T. Meade

I suspect that A World of Girls was one of L.T. Meade’s most popular books, because it’s the one that shows up most frequently on the title pages of her other books — you know: “by Mrs. L.T. Meade, author of A World of Girls, A Sweet Girl Graduate, etc.” — and that’s kind of why I hadn’t read it until now.

But if it was one of her most popular, there’s a reason: it’s pretty good. I kind of love L.T. Meade’s school stories. They’re from a generation or so before the classic English school stories by people like Angela Brazil or, later, Enid Blyton, so the school environment is completely different, with fewer students, a less formal atmosphere, and different kinds of activities. In A World of Girls, the big school playroom is lined with little partitions diivided from the rest of the room by railings and curtains, and older girls who are very good get their own partitions to furnish as they like and invite other girls to drink tea in.

Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences

Everyone loves well-written reviews of bad movies, right? Few things are funnier. And a review of practically anything will do, so long as someone is being witty at its expense. The best one I’d read recently was actually about a phone — David Pogue’s review of the Blackberry Storm in the New York Times (he finished by calling it dark, sodden, and unpredictable) — but yesterday it was displaced by this Mark Twain essay on the literary defects of James Fenimore Cooper.

The Diamond Coterie, by Lawrence Lynch

So, The Diamond Coterie was kind of awesome, and shall henceforth be enshrined in my heart, but it’s hard to know what to say about it, because there was a lot going on. There were a lot of characters, any of whom might turn out to be a detective in disguise, and a number of intertwined plots, although it was hard to say how many because the reader is never given the full confidence of any character.

We arrive in the small city of W—- on a day when two events have upset the richest and most aristocratic families in town. Miss Constance Wardour, an heiress who lives with her aunt Mrs. Aliston, has been robbed of her famous collection of diamonds. Sybil Lamotte, her best friend and the daughter of prominent businessman Jasper Lamotte, has eloped with John Burrill, a local ne’er-do-well with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The Lamotte family also includes the haughty Mrs. Lamotte, Evan — age about 20 — the alcoholic, and Frank, who is handsome and respectable and in love with Constance Wardour, but is somehow not quite to our liking.

Queen Hildegarde

There are a few kinds of children’s stories you see over and over. One that I happen to particularly like is the one where a kid from a city goes to live in the country, or in a small town, and communes with nature and gets their priorities straight. Queen Hildegarde is one of those.

Hildegarde Graham is the spoiled fifteen-year-old daughter of rich parents. She lives in New York City, is very pretty, has beautiful clothes, and is the envy of all her friends. Her parents, though, are sensible people, so they get worried about her, and when they have to go off to California for a few months, they send Hilda to stay with her mother’s old nurse.

Hildegarde is completely horrified by the prospect. She’s basically like, “farmers, ew!” and she uses the word “intolerable” a lot.

The Two Elsies and Elsie’s Kith and Kin

I haven’t been keeping up with writing about the Elsie books as I read them, but let’s forget about that and skip to book #11, The Two Elsies. The two Elsies in question are probably the original Elsie and her eldest daughter, but neither of them is particularly central to the story and several people have babies named Elsie at this point.

Anyway, a little background: in book #8, Elsie’s second daughter and third child, Violet, married Captain Raymond, a naval man and a widower with three children. Captain Raymond is away at sea much of the time, so Elsie and her father — he and his wife kind of moved in with Elsie after Mr. Travilla died in book #7 — say that the kids can come live with them (Violet is continuing to live at home, too). Max, the eldest, is kind of hasty and impulsive, but basically a good kid. Lulu has a bad temper that she has trouble controlling (in other words, she has a backbone, which means that she’s kind of alone in this series) but she is also scrupulously honest. Grace is a sickly but gentle little girl who soon becomes nearly as religious as Elsie was at her age. At this point, the books start to focus in on Lulu and her father, reworking the father daughter relationship that was so creepy in the earliest Elsie books, except that in this version, Lulu is pretty much always in the wrong, and also there’s a fair amount of corporal punishment, described in more detail than I wanted to read.

Tracy Park, 11/11

I don’t know why Jerrie and Harold think everyone will be surprised that they’re engaged. They’re the only two characters in the book that didn’t realize they were in love with each other, and when they announce that they’re going to be married, everyone tells them so.

Tracy Park, 10/11

It’s been a while since I updated, I know. Sadly, sometimes schoolwork has to take precedence. When we last saw the characters of Tracy Park, Jerrie was convalescing, Maude was still pretty sick, and Harold had gone to Tacoma, WA on business for Billy Peterkin. Arthur was off on the west coast, hoping to meet with highwaymen or something. Jerrie had just learned that Harold was suspected of stealing Mrs. Tracy’s diamond’s ten years previously — and hey, that’s what comes of not clearing him of suspicion properly in the first place — and in spite of the fact that she’s not quite well yet, she immediately got up and set out for the park house.

Tracy Park, 9/11

Just after Jerrie discovers the bag and the diamonds, Harold comes along on the way to the train station. She shows him the diamonds.

Harold: Mrs. Tracy’s diamonds!

Jerrie: Yes, Mrs. Tracy’s diamonds.