Hi there. My New Year’s resolution is to update regularly again. We’ll see how it goes.
Maybe starting with a bad book will make things easier? The Billiard Room, by Brian Flynn, is very bad. It feels like it was written by an alien whose only knowledge of human society was gleaned from other second rate country house mystery novels. Apparently it’s the first of a long series. I wonder if Flynn got any better, but I’m not curious enough to try to find out. Read the rest of this entry ?
So, I don’t know if the whole Polly and Eleanor series is going to happen for me, this time around. It’s partly that I’ve been reading too slowly and I’ve lost momentum, and partly that my attention is on other things. But also Polly and Eleanor is, you know, not very good–and in frustrating ways. Read the rest of this entry ?
I read the first five books in Lillian Elizabeth Roy’s Polly Brewster series in 2007, right around when I started this blog. I had to stop there, because the sixth book wasn’t out of copyright yet, but since then, when I’ve thought about the public domain expanding in 2019, I’ve thought, “Oh, then I’ll be able to read the next Polly and Eleanor book.” 2019 felt really far away in 2007, but it’s finally here, so it feels appropriate to celebrate this blogiversary by revisiting this series.
This is making it sound like these books are really great, and if I recall correctly, they’re not. Polly of Pebbly Pit certainly isn’t, but it’s not bad, either–it’s just a decent girls’ series book for people who like girls’ series books, with an emphasis on sensible parenting and some mean-spirited comic relief. Read the rest of this entry ?
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. Read the rest of this entry ?
There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to write a straightforward review of a Patty Fairfield book, and yet here we are. This is my fourth attempt at writing about Patty-Bride. The third time was not the charm.
You know how books often go downhill when the romance wraps up? This is a whole book of that, but with some spies to spice things up. Two weeks ago when Patty Blossom ended, no world events had been mentioned in the entire series. But now the US has entered WWI, and when Patty isn’t mooning over Bill Farnsworth and writing him appallingly gooey letters, she’s knitting socks for soldiers and working for war-related charities. Read the rest of this entry ?
I’m not going to write about all my recent E. Phillips Oppenheim reads–I’ve read about twenty of his books over the past month and a half, and that’s too many. But the more I read, the better a handle I get on him, and I’m finding most of his short story characters really enjoyable.
The Double Four seems to have been published before Peter Ruff, but Peter Ruff comes first chronologically. (You can find the two volumes in one here. I thought it was going to be a third Peter Ruff book, and was disappointed.) Peter is a nice young master criminal who falls in love with a young woman without anything in particular to recommend her. He’s trying to settle into a dull, middle-class lifestyle (to correspond with hers) when the police catch up with him and he has to leave his identity behind and create a new one. Read the rest of this entry ?
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. Read the rest of this entry ?
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. Read the rest of this entry ?
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 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 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.
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 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. Read the rest of this entry ?
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. Read the rest of this entry ?
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. Read the rest of this entry ?
Redeeming Qualities 