Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The Indian Mummy Mystery by Troy Nesbit
Shortly after finishing Tom Swift and his Rocket Ship, I was in the mood for another non-Blyton, so I picked off my shelf one of the Troy Nesbit books. Whereas Tom Swift is the creation of the Stratameyer Syndicate (published by Grosset & Dunlap) and therefore subject to routine butchering by overzealous trimbots, the Troy Nesbit books are published by trusty, reliable Whitman and written by a real author with a distinctive style. Other books published by Whitman include the excellent Brains Benton series (6 books), and the not-so-good Power Boys series (6 books), all of which I have on my shelves. I don't yet have all the Troy Nesbits, but these are easy to find and I'll be getting the rest in due course, now that I know how good they are!
I've only read one so far, but one is enough to tell me these are worth having. In this particular case, I'm not sure "Mystery" is the right word; maybe The Indian Mummy Adventure would have been more appropriate as it's more akin to the Famous Five than the Five Find-Outers — only not set in Devon or Cornwall, but in dusty Colorado. This the Wild West version of the Famous Five, with Joe Cutler playing the part of Julian, and Denny Grogan as Dick. Joe (15) lives with his mother and Grandpa on the Rocking O ranch, where they rent out cabins to visitors. Denny (13) spends a lot of his time hanging out with Joe and occasionally (reluctantly!) helps with the chores of tidying and cleaning the cabins. Then along comes Harold Hansen, or Huff (14), visiting with his mother. I'm not sure who Huff would be the Famous Five equivalent of — perhaps George in a way, being an outsider and fairly independent. Huff has a keen interest in collecting old Indian artifacts — pots, arrow heads, and so on — and so Joe and Denny promise to take Huff to nearby "ghost town" Canary City.
There's not much left of this small town. In the late eighteen-eighties it had been a booming mining town until it had burned to the ground and never got rebuilt; today it's what Enid Blyton would call a "tumbledown" old place, full of memories. The only person living in there is an old hermit named Tom, a cranky old man who doesn't like visitors on "his" property. Actually the entire area is owned by Grandpa; he bought it all years afterwards and turned it into pasture. But he let old Tom stay in his shack.
The adventure starts when the boys dig around and find some old coins, and then a skull with a bullet hole in the forehead. This sparks a few memories in Grandpa, who tells the story of a robbery and a murder in days gone by. That explains the skull — but part of the story involves a mummified corpse wrapped in blankets, that Grandpa found. This mummy was subsequently stolen from him by some rustlers, and it was never seen again. The mummy goes by the catchy name of Bellyache Bill, because the figure is doubled up as if suffering from a spot of indigestion. Where could it be today? There's good reason to believe it's still in the area, hidden away...
This is almost Blyton territory, and so is the hidden passage the boys find behind the ruins of a house in old Canary City. This old passage contains a safe (the Wild West version of a treasure chest in the smugglers' caves of Cornwall) and in this safe is some old papers and what appear to be an old Confederate coin. Normally Confederate coins are worthless, but this one turns out to be valuable. But it's the papers that interest old Grandpa and the boys, as there's a rough map scrawled on one of them. Without going into a lot of back story, it's evident that the mummy is hidden away in an old Indian dwelling in the nearby mountains.
The mountains were once home to Ute Indians. Set into these mountains are the ruins of old Ute houses — basically caves and tunnels that have been walled up with flat slabs of stone and rock, with window openings and everything. Some of these caves look out over the valley, a sheer drop to the valley floor, with access via narrow ledges. The entire area has been turned into a National Park, run by rangers, but some of these old dwellings are so well hidden that it's highly conceivable no one has set foot in them for a hundred years or more. The map leads the three boys and Grandpa, along with some accompanying park rangers, to a cave-home on the side of a cliff. It's risky business, but Joe insists on being the first one to investigate, and so the rangers lower him down on a rope and he swings onto a ledge, crawls into the dwelling, and... finds the mummy!
There's a lot of back story to the adventure; a lot of hunting about, even some mischief when Huff stupidly hides the skull in the coolbox while out on a picnic. Naturally his mother faints with shock! There's a good scene in a diner too, where Grandpa faces off against a coin collector who tries to buy Huff's "cheap Confererate coin" for a measly few dollars. After a bit of bartering, the coin collector rapidly increases his offer from $100 to $1000... and then Grandpa makes a phone call and finds out the coin is worth at least $3000. Back in 1954, that's a lot of money!
There's enough length to this novel to really get into it. And there's enough room for the author to breathe. It seems that many non-Blyton children's books (especially American ones) are on a straight line from start to finish; they're not allowed to deviate from the plot, for fear of losing the young readers' interest. But Troy Nesbit is refreshingly casual in his approach, lovingly detailing many non-essential scenes. He also avoids the "pat" storytelling that normally means "boy goes for walk with dog, dog finds rabbit hole leading to passage, boy explores passage, boy finds treasure." Nesbit's version would more likely be "boy goes for walk with dog, dog finds rabbit hole leading to passage, boy explores passage, finds nothing, gives up, explores somewhere else, finds some coins that aren't worth anything, gives up, gets despondent..." In other words, you never quite know what's going to happen, which is nice.
One thing that struck me as odd was that, after an entire book searching for a missing mummy, and after naming the book "The Indian Mummy Mystery," the finding of the mummy in the penultimate chapter is treated almost perfunctorily. Joe's dangerous descent into the Indian dwelling is the culmination of all their efforts; once he's inside, he sits back to rest and leans against something soft — something wrapped in blankets. He's found the mummy at last! But that's the end of the chapter, and the final chapter is like an epilogue; the mummy is in the museum, and the boys have made a great sale on the valuable coin they found, enough to buy them an old jalopy (a rickety old car). Somewhere before this epilogue, Joe has turned sixteen, old enough to drive. I suspect the next books in the series will make use of that!
A final word about the illustrations. I like them a lot. In fact I have two copies of this book, and the one seen here is probably harder to find. It contains "color" illustrations, or black and white illustrations with a tasteful sepia/brown overlay that I like (unlike the garish blues and reds that some of the old Famous Fives used). The illustrations themselves are different, and far superior, to the other version of the book I have. I haven't done any research on this yet, but if there are any Troy Nesbit fans with some information about the different available editions, I'm all ears!
Addendum: Having started into another Troy Nesbit book, I now realize that each in the series is a one-off novel, with different characters! This surprised me, but I'm finding this new one, The Forest Fire Mystery, even more enjoyable than the last, with a really nice brother/sister team, some excellent baddies, and truly mysterious goings-on. Why has it taken me so long to get around to these books??
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Also, if you watch the movie Horton Hears a Who!, there's a scene where the scientist has a laser directed on a small rock in the background. That rock suddenly explodes into a much larger, odd-shaped rock. I've seen this before in movies, and never quite understood what was happening; but oddly enough I saw this particular scene in Horton the day after reading how the main character in The Forest Fire Mystery finds a piece of perlite -- otherwise known as "popcorn rock" because, when rapidly heated, the water trapped inside expands explosively and causes the rock to "pop" like popcorn. The result is a very lightweight rock about fifteen times bigger than its original size. Very interesting!! So, if nothing else, I have to say Troy Nesbit is teaching me a few things. :-)
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