Vicky Van

I’ve been pretty busy lately — I’m sort of moving tomorrow, for one thing — but today is the 149th anniversary of Carolyn Wells’ birth, and I figured I should a) do something Carolyn Wells-related today, and b) think up something really excitingly Carolyn Wells-related for next year’s 150th.

So. Vicky Van. My usual reaction to Carolyn Wells’ mystery novels is not entirely respectful, to say the least. I mock because I love. But I feel no need to mock Vicky Van.

Our narrator is Chester Calhoun, one of those lawyers who so frequently pop up as narrators in mystery novels, using their clientele as an excuse to investigate a mystery, and usually falling in love along the way. Chester lives with his sister and his aunt in a house on the upper east side, and across the street lives Victoria Van Allen, known to her friends as Vicky Van.

To M.L.G.; or, He Who Passed

I’m fascinated by anonymous novels. I love seeing ads in old Publisher’s Weeklys claiming that a new novel is written by a bestselling author who’s concealing his or her name to see how it’ll affect sales. I think it’s amazing that people used to be able to publish anonymous sequels to other authors’ books. When I can find it, I love speculation about who the real author might be.

To M.L.G.; or He Who Passed is an anonymous novel from 1912 that purports to be the autobiography of a successful American actress. She’s fallen in love with an Englishman, and he with her, but she’s scared to tell him about her somewhat disreputable past face to face, so she’s decided to publish it as a book instead.

Doctor Syn

It doesn’t make sense for the early 19th century Kentish town of Dymchurch to have smugglers. It’s got the wrong sort of coastline. What it has got is a well-liked baronet, a pious but down-to-earth vicar given to singing pirate songs and possibly some demons who frolic in the Romney Marsh at night. And maybe smugglers too. That’s what Captain Collyer and his men have come to find out, anyway.

The book goes back and forth between the townspeople and the sailors, and you’re never pushed to choose a side. Nobody is completely likable, except for one fairly minor character who appears late in the book, and the closest thing we get to a protagonist is a rum-drinking twelve year old whose ambition in life is to become a hangman. Doctor Syn, the vicar, is appealing, but seems increasingly dangerous as the book goes on.

I thought the twist was fairly obvious from the beginning, but I expected Russell Thorndyke to take it in a different, lighter direction. Instead, much of the book is sort of chilling. It’s good, though. I kept forming new expectations as I read, and Thorndyke kept surprising me.

Doctor Syn is kind of a weird book. It starts out pretty lighthearted and gets much darker, but that implies a steadier, clearer kind of change than I felt. It’s all over the place. Sometimes you’re hearing from the townspeople, and sometimes you’re hearing from the sailors, and it’s never really clear if you’re supposed to be on anyone’s side.

Top 10 Underappreciated Children’s Books, 3/3

Part 1/3

Part 2/3

These are the top three, and I’ve put them in an order, but it’s not an important order. These are some of my favorite books, and I love them too much to be able to judge which I love the most. I have no idea how I managed to write anything about them, or why I thought I could in the first place. If you asked me about any of these three books in person, I would gape like a fish and flail a little bit. This is not speculation; it is a thing I’ve done.

A note on illustrations: All three of these books have illustrations that are inextricably bound up with the experience of reading the books. These aren’t after-the-fact illustrations: Ruth Gannett’s were done by her stepmother. Russell Hoban’s were done by his wife. Jean Merrill gave Ronni Solbert a cameo in the book. So if you decide to go looking for any of these books (do!), make sure you get the original illustrations.

The Gauntlet

I while ago Eleanor recommended Ronald Welch’s Carey family series, which follows various Careys as they participate in pretty much every major conflict England’s been involved in in the last thousand years. We have similar taste in historical adventure novels, so I had pretty high hopes for Welch, and Knight Crusader, the first Carey book, was enormously fun — both bloodier and more educational than I expected. But the next Welch book in the New York Public Library’s collection takes place several hundred years later, and I get kind of weird about reading series in order, so now I’m just hoping to randomly stumble across the next book somewhere.

But the NYPL also had another Welch book, written shortly before Knight Crusader. It’s called The Gauntlet, and it’s a timeslip novel in which a young boy spending a vacation in Wales picks up a metal gauntlet and finds himself in the middle ages, where he is taken for the son of the local Norman family. It’s even more intensely educational than Knight Crusader, but that’s sort of what timeslip novels are for most of the time: you get to listen in on the protagonist getting everything explained to them.  And Welch knows his stuff, as far as I can tell.

It’s sort of exactly what you would expect of a children’s historical novel written in the fifties, and I mean that in a good way. It’s not the most emotionally engaging book, but it doesn’t need to be. And Welch is one of those writers who knows how to give you as much revenge as you want without giving you so much that you wish you hadn’t wanted it in the first place, although that might be a matter of opinion. I’m not sure how my thirst for revenge on fictional characters stacks up against other people’s.

Anyway, a pretty good book.

The Dragon’s Secret

The Dragon’s Secret is the least good of the Augusta Huiell Seaman books I’ve read, which is a shame, because it started really well. The setting — a seaside resort in the autumn, an empty bungalow — was very much in its favor, and so was the setup — a girl keeping her invalid aunt company meets up with another girl who is there on a fishing trip with her father and brother, and they find an mysterious, ornate, and unopenable (a real word, believe it or not) box buried in the sand — but there’s no follow-through. The two girls do a little sneaking around, but they don’t really figure out anything on their own, and it turns out they’ve just stumbled into someone else’s mystery, which eventually gets explained to them. And because they really don’t know anything about what’s going on until they’re told, there’s not much life to the story. Still, there was something fun and atmospheric about it, so it’s not a total loss.

Bobbie, General Manager

It’s pretty cool to find that an advertising campaign from 1913 can still be effective nearly a hundred years later.

When I go through issues of Publisher’s Weekly and The Bookman from the early teens, I’m usually looking for fluff — things like From the Car Behind, and Pleasures and Palaces. And I love that kind of book, but I consider myself incredibly lucky when I stumble on something like Bobbie, General Manager instead. The premise isn’t anything unusual: we’re supposed to be reading a journal kept by a young woman, as in Phyllis, The Heart of Una Sackville, and any number of other books. What’s different is the content, but I’m not really sure how to describe how it’s different, except that Olive Higgins Prouty never takes the easy way out. On the other hand, she doesn’t manufacture drama, either. Interesting things happen, but in a low-key, sensible kind of way. Money doesn’t solve problems. The heroine’s story doesn’t end with happily ever after. People change and grow. It’s kind of fantastic.

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Who’s Bobbie?