Tom Slade, Forest Ranger

I started Tom Slade, Forest Ranger in January (at a hockey game) but I couldn’t get through it. This kid Henny Vollmer kills someone by accident, and it was stressing me out.

Tom Slade at Black Lake

I think you can see Percy Keese Fitzhugh growing as a writer over the course of the Tom Slade series, especially in the wartime sequence of books. Tom Slade at Black Lake comes after the war, but it’s more part of that sequence than the next one, not just because it deals with the consequences of the war, but because Tom is still kind of there in his head.

It seems weird to have a juvenile series where the hero goes off to war and then comes home and picks up where he left off. In another author’s hands it probably would be. But Fitzhugh knows exactly how much he’s put Tom through, and that things won’t be the same even if he does plunk Tom down in exactly the same place, and he takes Tom’s mental health as seriously as the lingering weakness in his wounded arm. 

Tom Slade with the Flying Corps/Captain Blood Day 2017

Look, I know it’s Captain Blood Day, and really I should be posting about a Sabatini book, but…I think Sabatini would mostly approve of Tom Slade, seeing as many of his heroes are also a) cripplingly honorable and b) super awkward. Anyway, Happy Captain Blood Day! May we all be as ready with a good comeback as Peter Blood.

Tom Slade with the Flying Corps is, honestly, kind of amazing. It’s not perfect, but it’s clever and unexpected: a mostly-successful experiment.

Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer

So, Tom Slade, Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer, is kind of great. It picks up some time after Tom Slade with the Boys Over There ends, and since we last saw him, Tom has become a motorcycle messenger.

There are no significant plot developments in this book–Tom is a very good dispatch bearer at the beginning and a very good dispatch bearer at the end–but it doesn’t need them. Instead we get some episodic adventures as Tom joins some of the fighting at the front lines, gets captured — sort of — along with a sniper, and races a ship to port on his motorcycle. He meets two old friends and impresses them both thoroughly, and one of his adventures is so genuinely tense that it was uncomfortable to read.

I feel like Percy Keese Fitzhugh was experimenting over the course of the WWI Tom Slade books, of which this is the last one. The first, Tom Slade with the Colors, is structured very much like the prewar books, and so is the second. But that one (Tom Slade on a Transport) end with a clear setup for the next book. And Tom Slade with the Boys Over There is self contained in a way none of the previous books have been. And then this one is, in a way, the most normal of them all — but that’s not normal for Fitzhugh, and I felt like there was an experimental quality to it.

Tom Slade with the Boys Over There

Tom Slade with the Boys Over There has a highly inaccurate title. He is “Over There,” but there’s only one other boy: Archibald Archer, who he met in Tom Slade with the Colors.

I’ve been kind of hesitant to spoil the plots of these, but I guess it doesn’t matter, so: this book starts just after Tom and Archer escape a German POW camp, and follows them on their journey through German territory.  Unsurprisingly, his boy scout skills come in handy traveling through the Black Forest.

It’s hard to know what to write about these books if I don’t want to recount the plots in detail, and I don’t. This book is a lot more coherent than any of the others I’ve read, because it’s really just recounting one adventure, and that’s nice. But it also gives a lot of page time to Archer, who isn’t all that interesting, and doesn’t appreciate Tom in a way that satisfies me. Or maybe it’s just that Tom is less single-handedly brilliant here. Which probably makes for a better, more balanced book, but doesn’t satisfy my heart’s apparently endless need for Tom Slade a) being amazing and b) not realizing how amazing he is, c) being initially underrated by others, and d) finally being appreciated as he deserves.

Tom Slade on a Transport

Tom Slade on a Transport feels like a do-over. Like, Tom Slade with the Colors was about Tom getting a job on a ship, and it was going to take him to Europe where he was presumably going to get more involved in the war. But then I guess Fitzhugh felt like he needed to get Tom back to Bridgeboro, for whatever reason.

In this book, Fitzhugh wastes no time in getting Tom on another ship, and one with a better mystery. One of the things I appreciate about Percy Keese Fitzhugh is that he does a really good job of adding emotional stakes to his mysteries. Here, it has the effect of changing Tom’s desire to fight from a patriotic one to an intensely personal one.

Anyway, this time Tom actually gets to Europe–and lands in grimmer circumstances than you really expect from a children’s book.

Tom Slade with the Colors

It wasn’t clear exactly how old Tom was in the first three books, but Tom Slade with the Colors brings us into World War I, and it’s suddenly relevant. So: he’s seventeen, and anxious to enlist in the army, but Mr. Ellsworth, the Bridgeboro troop’s scoutmaster, has made him promise not to lie about his age.

In typical Tom Slade fashion, he does something fairly heroic, acts like it’s no big deal and finds that everyone’s misunderstood his actions. So he comes up with another way to serve the war effort: working on a ship carrying…weapons, I think? Anyway he does some nifty detective work, makes friends with a Secret Service type, selflessly declines to get on a lifeboat, and, eventually, gets to have nice chat with the girl in his office who he doesn’t understand that he has a crush on.

I love one (1) boy scout.

Tom Slade on the River

Tom Slade on the River is set a year after Tom Slade at Temple Camp, but it feels like the second half of the same book, and only partly because it resolves a mystery that was set up in Temple Camp.

The first section combines most of my favorite things about Tom Slade. When the scouts arrive at Temple Camp and find a clue indicating that someone is injured and stranded on a mountain, Tom is the only one who immediately decides to try to find him. Everyone else just kind of accepts that something awful is happening, but for Tom it’s a matter of course that he has to at least try to do something.

Tom Slade at Temple Camp

I think I must have randomly come across Tom Slade at Temple Camp in a used bookstore when I was in high school. It was the first Percy Keese Fitzhugh book I read, and the one I’ve reread the most. So it’s hard to tell whether I think it’s good because it is good, or if I think it’s good because I love it.

Tom Slade: Boy Scout of the Moving Pictures

I don’t really know what the deal is with the Tom Slade series. It looks like Percy Keese Fitzhugh was hired to write a novelization of a silent film and just kind of…ran with it. He wrote Tom Slade a whole series, and did the same for several of his friends. But however it happened, I’m glad it did.

Tom Slade: Boy Scout of the Moving Pictures is the first book, and it’s hard to me to talk about it without jumping ahead and talking about the series as a whole, because Fitzhugh is a better writer than this project called for, and Tom is easily my favorite boys’ series character.

Tom Slade’s Double Dare

There’s a particular kind of plot, particularly common in adventure novels, where the hero, after having done something particularly heroic, is thought to have done something bad instead and is shunned by everyone until he is vindicated at the end.

I suspect that this was the only plot Percy Keese Fitzhugh knew how to write. His Tom Slade series is a paean to it. But if he only did one thing, he did it well. The Tom Slade series is my favorite boys’ series. None of the several companion series have the same self-righteous (but not sulky) angst that the Tom Slade books do.

Pee-Wee Harris and the Sunken Treasure

Pee-Wee Harris and the Sunken Treasure was pretty disappointing. But I shouldn’t have been expecting much — this is the first Pee-Wee Harris book I’ve read, but I’ve read a couple of the Roy Blakeley books, and it’s like Percy Keese Fitzhugh added a lot more jokes and thought no one would notice that he took out everything else. Oh well — at least the Pee-Wee Harris books have a third-person narrator.

Tom Slade on Mystery Trail

Usually when I read an old book I’ve bought, I think a little about what I’m going to write about it here. It’ a testament to how much I love the Tom Slade books that it wasn’t until I was practically done with Tom Slade on Mystery Trail that it occurred to me that I probably ought to post about it on my blog.

I first encountered Tom Slade and his author, Percy Keese Fitzhugh, in Tom Slade at Temple Camp, which was a gift from a friend, and he has since become my favorite boys’ series character. Fitzhugh wrote several other series about Tom’s boy scout friends, but Roy Blakeley, Pee-Wee Harris, and Westy Martin aren’t quite in Tom Slade’s league.

It’s hard to explain why Tom Slade is so cool. He’s sort of the strong, silent type, and he’s a little awkward with people sometimes. He’s the perfect boy scout, but he doesn’t always appear to be — like when he avoids saving a boy from drowning so that someone else can do it and get the badge awarded for saving someone’s life. He’s very low key, and I love that.

In Tom Slade on Mystery Trail, Tom isn’t the central character. He’s just helping out another boy, who, although he’s completely unlike Tom in personality, has that same selfless-boy-scout-honor thing going on. Hervey Willetts is one of those kids who obsesses over a project until it’s done and then forgets all about it. So his troop decides that he’s the ideal scot to win the Eagle badge — which, unlike today, simply involves winning 21 different other badges. But it’s just a few days until the Temple Camp awards ceremony, and Hervey is one badge short.

He almost got the tracking badge, but the tracks he was following were also being followed by Skinny McCord, the Bridgeboro troop’s newest — and weirdest — member. If Hervey claims the tracks, he gets the tracking badge and the Eagle badge. If Skinny does, he gets the tracking badge and becomes a second-class scout — pretty much the lowest honor there is, but Skinny’s really excited about it, so Hervey pretends he never saw the tracks and lets Skinny take the credit.

Hervey’s troop is really upset — they feel like he’s let them down, and they call him fickle because he says he doesn’t care about being an Eagle scout anymore. That’s because he’s been talking to Tom Slade, who understands that by the time a boy is a true Eagle scout, he doesn’t care about the honor anymore. It’s adorable, really. And then it turns out that Hervey has earned some kind of animal rescue badge without realizing it — because he never looks at his boy scout handbook — and is an Eagle scout after all, although no one would know if it weren’t for Tom Slade.

Also, there’s and oriole and a turtle who help Tom and Hervey rescue a kidnapped kid. But while that’s cute, the storyline about Hervey’s honor and self-sacrifice is even cuter.