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One of the most engaging features of the Rick Brant series is the weaving of fact with fiction. Rick does not just have a plane but first a Piper Cub and then a Skywagon (a Cessna 180), both real planes. In The Phantom Shark, Nanatiki Atoll, where the pearls are being cultivated is not real place but Noumea, New Caledonia is and the description of the former French prisoners known as bagnards is accurate. In The Scarlet Lake Mystery, the rockets mentioned such as the Aerobee and the Viking are real rockets of that era. The litany of realism in the Rick Brant books goes on and on. This is not to say that there weren’t any mistakes made in the series. The flight time of the moon rocket in The Rocket’s Shadow leaps immediately to mind, the book says it took about a minute and a half to reach the moon. It is the intertwining of the real and accurate descriptions of places and things with the fictional stories that shows the care and time Hal Goodwin (AKA John Blaine) took when writing the books. In the eighth book in the Rick Brant series, The Caves of Fear, an important plot element clearly illustrates that Hal Goodwin used careful planning and research and not just a little effort. In the story, Rick Brant receives a telegram (remember those?) from Chahda, the Indian beggar boy, befriended in the second book of the series, The Lost City. Chahda has sent the telegram from Singapore and it is all 7-digit numbers, obviously a code. The following is the coded message found on page 10 in The Caves of Fear: Rick Brant
Rick and his pal Scotty consult Rick’s father’s library and find the book, Cryptography for the Student (I don’t think this is a real book), but they don’t get very far. Then Rick’s mother, Mrs. Brant says “Why, this is the first time we’ve had a code problem on the island since the moon rocket.” The boys then realize that it must be a book code, similar to the one used by Manfred Wessel’s gang in The Rocket’s Shadow. In a book code, the numbers represent a page in the book and the position of the word on that page. It was obvious which book Chahda would use for the code: The World Almanac! That is the book that Chahda used to educate himself. He was always quoting “The Worrold Alm-in-ack” as he called it. The next step was to figure out which edition he used. The letter L in front of Chahda’s name was a clue to the edition, since Chahda’s full name was Chahda Sundararaman. The first guess was to use the 1912 Almanac since L was the twelfth letter in the alphabet. However, the library did not have that book and it didn’t seem likely that Chahda would have a 1912 almanac in Singapore. Rick realized that L is also the Roman numeral 50 and that the code book must be the 1950 World Almanac. (Note: The Caves of Fear was first published in 1951.) Rick, Scotty and Rick’s sister Barby then set to decoding the message. They figured out that each 7-digit number represented a word in the book. The first three digits are the page, the next two digits are the line on the page and the last two digits are the word on the line. If the number is larger than the number of pages, lines, or words in a line, the first digit is dropped. This is called using a “null” to make the groups all be the same size. To count the lines one starts below the line under the page heading. To count the words, simply count across ignoring columns. If you can find a copy of the 1950 World Almanac, you too can decode the message. For me, it was downright exciting when I first found a 1950 World Almanac and was able to decode the message. The coded message is a prime example of the care and effort that distinguishes Hal Goodwin as a writer of series books. He crafted his books; he did not simply fill in outlines. It would have been very easy for Goodwin to simply make up the numbers and/or make up the code book. He could have said it was the 1950 Universal Almanac, for example. (I don’t believe that is a real almanac). It would have made no difference to the actual story whether or not the telegram could be deciphered in real life. The Caves of Fear would have still been one of the best of the series. However, because the code was real, the story has a much more believable feel to it. This shows that Hal Goodwin did not take the easy shortcuts and was not just churning out a book. He put in a real coded message from a real book not because he had to but because he wanted to. It must be noted that one can quibble with the coded telegram as a plot device. In the story, Chahda is in a hurry to compose the message. If he was in such a hurry that he used the two words “be” and “Ware” to make “beware”, why is the message so long? It takes quite some time to decode the message; it must have taken even longer to find the words to compose it. Another quibble is that a telegram that long must have cost a fortune to send in 1951. Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles and they don’t detract from the effort shown by the author. The decoded message:
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