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Dear Friends,
My eldest daughter and I took a trip to a wonderful used bookstore downtown. She was on the hunt for yet another particular set of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, because she is an obsessive collector of Tolkienalia. I do not believe there is another 21-year-old in the world with a collection quite like hers. It is enough to make me just ever-so-slightly jealous. As I write this, she is sitting across from me with her nose buried in her mint-condition First Edition copy of The Smith of Wooton Major. Like I say, jealousy is a constant temptation around here.
They’d sold the set she wanted, but we didn’t leave empty handed. She found a bunch of vintage copies of Trixie Belden novels—again, she is the kind of nerd who only collects a very particular printing, and these happened to be the ones. It was a delightful score. And on the ride home as we chatted about the books, with me recalling the characters far better than she (Trixie, Honey, Jim, Regan, Dan, Violet—she was impressed), I had an epiphany.
Maybe I should back up. I am very, very probably the only fully grown, middle-aged man on the entire planet who can claim to have read every single Trixie Belden novel ever published. (If anyone else is out there, I’d love to hear from you.) That number would be thirty-nine, published over the years 1948-1986. The first six were written by Julie Campbell Tatham, and the next thirty-three were written by publishing house writers under the pseudonym Kathryn Kenny.
There is an explanation for this. First, I have always been extremely comfortable in my masculinity, even as a pre-teen. A juvenile fiction detective series with a female protagonist never bothered me one bit. I liked girls then, and I like them now. Fathering three of my own hasn’t dampened that enthusiasm. As a kid if I was in a crowd of people, I would be the boy hanging out with the gaggle of girls. Every time. They were way more interesting to me than the boys. This lack of self-consciousness made me very popular with the ladies. I suppose it also helped that in my elementary school years, my very best friend was a girl. Now, I didn’t broadcast to all my friends in those years that I was reading Trixie Belden in my spare time; I knew better than to invite teasing. But read them, I did.
I’ll keep the summary short. Beatrix “Trixie” Belden is a girl who lives on Crabapple Farm in upstate New York with her very large, modest, hard-to-make-ends-meet middle-class family. New neighbors move in on an estate just down the road, and Tomboyish Trixie befriends shy and insecure Honey, the only child of the very wealthy couple. As I recall, in their first “mystery” they meet Jim, an orphan. And, as happy endings would demand, Jim gets adopted by Honey’s parents. Aww! Isn’t that sweet? Honey always wanted a brother.
They form a club, of course, called the “Bob-Whites of the Glen” after the bird, complete with a secret “Bob-White” call to communicate with one another. And they fancy themselves detectives. Over the course of thirty-nine volumes, they solve thirty-nine “mysteries” and along the way pick up a motley crew of other characters: Dan, the “bad boy” with a leather jacket and switchblade. Violet, the beautiful, popular girl in school. And so forth. It’s juvenile fiction, not War & Peace.
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