Whispering

by John M. Enright

Reprinted with permission from The Mystery & Adventure Series Review, Spring 1987
Copyright © 1987, Fred Woodworth

It is unfortunate that in this crazy world the intelligent, well-written mysteries aimed at younger readers (but capable of being enjoyed by all ages) never received the discussion they deserved in the pages which mass magazines set aside to review supposedly entertaining books and films. Without apology or embarrassment, these magazines have devoted thousands of pages to reviews of such sexual hallucinations as Myra Breckinridge, Portnoy’s Complaint, Princess Daisy, and the celluloid which they consumed. In the cinema they draw attention to the Semple-minded vulgarities of James Bond in Never Say "Never Again".

Are we supposed to believe that we should take such stores into consideration while dismissing the Rick Brant, Ken Holt, and 1927-1953 Hardy Boys adventures? If not, if the reviews and attention given to Daisy books is undeserved, then it follows that the critics must be viewing the entertainment scene through pose-colored glasses – full of pretense and other unpleasant substances. What the critics choose to write about tells us more about the fundamental corruption of their outlook than all of their editorials combined.

What is the prejudice? Is it that mystery-adventure works are stupid? It can’t be that, because Time and Newsweek are always reviewing works of endless stupidity. Is it that the stories are too lightweight? This view is no doubt down in the small part of their minds, but it hasn’t decided much since Gary Cooper elected not to appear in Foreign Correspondent – and later realized that he had blown the call. All that is left is that the books are for "all boys from 10 to 14 who like lively adventure stories." Now, some boys of that age today may have a few things wrong with them (like purple Mohawks), but in my day – doggone if we weren’t nearly perfect! If a young person’s entertainment is intelligent, then it merits visible discussion far more than the "accepted" writers regularly reviewed. This isn’t the world as it is, of course, but as it should be. Critics ought to admit that on these series books from thirty to fifty years ago there is no stamp stating: Warning: This book is rated K-14. Kids over 14 caught reading this book will be busted.

This said, one can turn to a book full of excitement, intelligence, and consistency – one which is very much worth writing about.

Originally announced as The Whistling Box, the fifth adventure of Rick Brant and his sidekick, Scotty, actually appeared in 1948 under the title The Whispering Box Mystery. Here in the title is our first evidence that some serious thinking has gone into the work. "Whistling" is merely noise, a technical description of the sound the criminals’ box-weapon makes when it is aimed and activated. If we were operating on the level of bad Bond or of "Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother", certainly the original title would have sufficed. Why the change, and why does it make so much difference?

The selection of a different word gives this entry a deeper meaning, for recurrent through the surface excitement is a theme of whispering. With a sussurant sound, the weapon which the enemy employs attacks the "inner ear", deafening and paralyzing the victim. Parallel to this is a secrecy in the scientific community on Spindrift Island; even as the island is isolated from other people, so too is Rick Brant isolated from the older generation, through an information blackout, a lack of communication. The easy rapport of his younger days has evaporated and now adults are cold and distant.

The clue in the title returns to the reader’s mind as, shut of a secret world, Rick Brant can barely hear "the scientists conversing in low tones" (P. 25). His interest in what the adults are up to might seem natural, but over and over Rick’s curiosity is condemned. (On page 2: "His father… had told him curtly not to ask questions!") Scotty is older and also less curious. The curiosity of Rick’s younger sister, Barbara ("Barby") is the most emphatic: "As switchboard operator.., she loved to listen to her brother, Barby complains: "Dad… made me go into the kitchen so I couldn’t listen." To the young people, doors are locked and their natural curiosity remains unsatisfied. A heavy veil is thrown over adult activities.

Failing to enter the adult world Rick invents a new addition to his own: a more powerful dog whistle. Although ostensibly the series leads are heroes every reader would like to emulate, their curiosity and scientific experimentation are jarringly punished. When in cooperation with the older scientists Rick fashions his ultrasonic whistle (which will circumvent human ears), the result is anything but positive and impressive: a friendly and harmless dog, Dismal, is knocked for a loop b the extreme frequency. The hand of science has invaded the natural world. In a grim echo of this overreaching, Rick himself is later victimized by a similar invention. Says Hartson Brant: "Now you know how Dismal felt, son." Three years before Box appeared, scientific experimentation resulted in two Japanese cities being blown off the map.

After the whispering and the silence, the breakdown in communications becomes complete when the two scientists, Zircon and Weiss, disappear altogether.

This project Rick Brant into a new role, in which he (literally) wears a new hat, a present from girl. "The hat makes you look older," says Scotty. It also makes him look like his father, whom he now thinks has disappeared. Again, the convention is that this is positive, that Rick is "following in his father’s footsteps." But as a symbol of science, Hartson Brant can be reprimanded for helping unleash destructive forces onto the natural world. And when Rick is "the spitting image" of him, overreaching himself again, the ground is rudely cut out from under both men. The box strikes.

Rick "fought to keep his balance, but he could no longer exercise control… He struck the sidewalk." Later, in a lab, "Rick opened his eyes and stared up" at his father, who has not vanished after all.

The theory is that Rick was only attacked because the gang mistook him for his father, but his too will come into question. Meanwhile, when a counter measure to the whispering box is discussed by Dr. Keppner, he describes it as "what might be called an ultrasonic loudspeaker." Operating in a false sense of security, Rick and Scotty decide to leave him to his work while they stroll around the town. Forgetting his hat so that he no longer looks like "a stranger" (p. 80), Rick set out for an evening tour of Washington, D.C.

If he has regained his own identity, however, it is only just in time for the author, Harold L. Goodwin ("John Blaine"), to jettison another preconception. Even as a scientist-protagonist is customarily presented as a force for good, so does the Lincoln Memorial exude an aura of safety, of peace, of unity, of stability. ("He felt as though the Great Emancipator were about to rise and speak.") Goodwin presents this image only to shatter it: beneath the surface, the reality is turbulent and threatening, and there exists no giant figure to preserve and protect them. They are on their own.

At the Memorial, Rick and Scotty begin to suspect that they are being followed. Once again, the paradoxes of curiosity come into play. From another symbol of safety and security they borrow a pair of binoculars to peer into the shadowy trees some distance away. They spot a gang-member, holding a whispering box.

"See what you wanted to see?"

Scotty smiles wryly. "We saw what we didn’t want to see." (p. 92)

Even a nearby park police office can’t accept their reality. He contents himself with the peaceful image: "Sounds to me like you kids have been seeing too many movies." (p. 90)

Rick Brant and Don Scott must live in a world which prefers comforting delusions to hard reality, so they are deafened by the box; but because of their flight from that type of thinking they are not laid low by the box. Their passage is fraught with peril and hardship, but because of Scotty’s knowledge of what is hidden behind a wall it ends in rescue from overhead: "He rolled over, face to the night sky, and his imagination filled the sky with leaping bodies." (p. 102)

Back in the lab, Fanning (Dr. Keppner’s assistant) is curious about the scientists’ new ultrasonic counter-weapon and decides to try it out. New it is Rick’s turn to object (and with good reason): "He didn’t like experimenting without any idea of the possible results.." To what appears at first to be frivolous activity, there is sometimes a darker side.

As it had at the Memorial, danger strikes Brant and Scott in the one place in which it seems that they will be safest: in a taxicab driven by an old buddy. Their friends’ lives threatened, they are forces to ride into captivity. Once more, acquiring information which they had desired so much isn’t as pleasant or as helpful as they had anticipated: "In a little while they would have the answer to the riddle of the missing scientists… But it wouldn’t do them the slightest bit of good."

The communication with the older scientists – a contact once denied them by those closest to them – is now theirs, but the delay has come at a terrific cost. All are now looking through the same binoculars, sharing the same vision, but in the meantime the picture has changed. Like the decaying Victorian house in which they are now held prisoner, the things they have now would have been infinitely more enjoyable and more advantageous in earlier days.

Like youth, the old house is lost and left behind as Rick and Scotty join forces with Zircon, helping him down the front stairs. (See frontispiece.)

For scientists (scio meaning I know) these people reside in an extremely murky world of sworn secrecy, locked doors, unanswered questions, unrecognized friends, and unknown enemies. Just as Rick appeared earlier as a double for his father, Dr. Brant, so now the gangleader (through a physical peculiarity) passes himself off as another scientist, Dr. Bertona. The scientists began rejecting Rick Brant and now end by embracing the Bertona imposter. The underworld, by contrast, saw and accepted Rick as an adult, and that was the only way in which he entered the adult group.

With remarkable objectivity, government scientist Goodwin presents the underworld as far shrewder in its estimation of Rick Brant than are the scientists from his own community. And neither inherent intelligence nor objective danger can shake the adult officials from their view that Brant is innocuous and undeserving of their attention and protection. Rather than benefiting instantly from teamwork, the hero must overcome his associates as well as his adversaries.

Their counter-weapon gives the scientists the screaming frequency they want; but due to the gangleader’s willingness to use a crowd of young men, the gang escapes. In the end, it is Rick Brant’s inspired addition to the gang’s empty box which levels not only the boss of the hoods but also some adults on his own team. The destructive weapons of science don’t discriminate between the just and the unjust.

Rather than consisting of random props, the decor of Whispering Box reflects and advance the story and illuminates the characters: the altered airgun, the deceptive hat, the borrowed binoculars, the serene statue, the protective taxicab, the Victorian mansion. Unlike, say, Howard Pease, novelist Goodwin does not belabor or exaggerate his characters; part of his characterization emerges through his imagery, and in it he is simultaneously more direct and complex than Pease. What Howard Pease’s adolescent leads rehash for a chapter, Goodwin reduces all of a sudden to a new hat.

The Whispering Box Mystery was an outstandingly entertaining novel, and Mr. Goodwin did not produce another as skillful until 1957, when he came out with The Electronic Mind Reader.

Even as The Whispering Box Mystery dealt with the efforts of scientific adults trying to exclude young people form their world, so The Electronic Mind Reader can be read as a view of male adults trying to isolate young women from theirs. At once the resuscitator and the ultimate suffocator of Harold L. Goodwin’s Rick Brant series, Reader plows headlong into hostile attitudes at Grosset & Dunlap. As the series progresses and introduces Jan Miller, it attempts to drag the misogynists at Grosset kicking and screaming into a world also occupied by young women. The prejudice at G & D was deep-seated, however: in a somewhat breathtaking and totally mystifying blurb which appeared at the end of some 1950s Hardy Boys books as an advertisement for the Brant adventures, Grosset magnanimously announced that "girls are all right – in their place!"

"Their place" was not beside boys but off somewhere in River Heights, separate but equal, nice but remote; fantasy rather than realistic relationships. Clearly, young ladies who learn to use aqualungs are learning too much; and when they employ their new-found skills to assume the roles of sleuths themselves, it only confirmed Grosset’s most frenzied fears.

The publisher rejected Brant’s progression and elected to follow the Stratemeyer Syndicate into the dead end of revisionist folly. Ultimately, Grosset’s failure to appreciate individuality over volume left it with neither; the Brant/Holt books were allowed to lapse, and the insincerity of the Stratemeyer rewrites was echoed in a 1979 "divorce" trial in which Simon & Schuster won the dubious distinction of being allowed to climb into bed with Harriet Adams. G & D’s choice in the sixties was like a man who trades his Double Eagles for paper dollars at face value: the poorhouse can’t be far ahead. Like the Hollywood moguls who purchased their company, Grosset & Dunlap gambled everything on mediocrity – and lost.

Some series, such as the Tod Moran mysteries over at Doubleday, mostly strike the same chord, presenting a single experience over and over. But like a person growing up, the Brant series in volume twelve turns from youth to adult, from gallantry to near-romance as Rick and Scotty team up with Jan and Barby. If the adults of Whispering Box assembled merely for a portrait of collective defeat, the young people of Mind Reader are only complete and only find triumph in union.

The heresies of Mind Reader begin with the invasion of Spindrift. A light-hearted, passive life of watching adults on television changes into a world in which all four teenagers become old enough to assume adult responsibilities. This lends the events which follow a stature above that of, say, a tennis match in which the viewer looks only for winners, losers and striking serves.

This is not to exaggerate the novel’s depth but merely to underscore its subtlety. It is not as simple as the smug would have us believe, any more than their fat bestsellers are as acceptable as they assure us they are. Don’t let anyone kid himself that a mystery adventure series book can’t have a point of view. Because of his outlook, Canadian novelist Leslie McFarlane, who actually wrote most of the classic Hardy Boys, got into trouble with the Stratemeyer crowd early on. Obviously The Hardy Boys: Hunting for Hidden Gold would be far different if it had been ghosted not by Mr. McFarlane but rather by a policeman. The point of view would change radically. Chet Morton would promptly be busted for truancy, loitering, assault on an officer, interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty, and probably fourteen counts of gluttony.

That the eastern mass magazines have overlooked these series is their own loss. What the novels of McFarlane, Goodwin, and Samuel Epstein lack in prestige they more than make up for in quality.

Goodwin’s own viewpoint is reflected in his creation of Dr. Marks, "the reluctant bachelor" (p. 38, The Electronic Mind Reader), a man whose view of women parallels that of Grosset & Dunlap. A contrast with the freshness of the teenagers, Dr. Humphrey Marks is undone by his stubborn insistence on doing things as he’s always done them. His refusal to grow leads to his connection with the wrong people on a train. He having rejected the future, they, with their brainwave machine, steal his past. His memory disappears. As Goodwin has started in Something About the Author, his bias is in favor of those who enjoy "opening new horizons and possibilities."

Next Goodwin recalls the beginning of the book, where Brant was passively watching television, as he again presents a cautionary glimpse at the dangers of spying on other people. The scene in which Brant spies on the barber shop with a monocular that a sports shop has lent him, is a derivation of the episode of the borrowed binoculars at the Lincoln Memorial in Whispering Box a decade before. The difference here is that Brant is no longer peering into darkness and mystery but into the bright, routine barber ship of Lewis Collins. But neither man is as innocent as he seems. Having already been told that Collins is now working in the shop, Brant is less a detective than a voyeur. Having had the elevator operator wink at him as signal, the corrupt barber, Collins is using his equipment to set in motion the destruction of those he is pretending to help.

Although his surveillance is implicitly condemned by the interference of naturals sounds, the voyeurism of Brant triumphs over the corruption of Collins because the former is redeemed by the common good. But unlike many mysteries, all is not explained at the end. Goodwin chooses to finish both Box and Mind Reader with a snub of omniscience: "We may never get the whole story."

And thanks to Grosset, we will never get the whole series (e.g., The Magic Talisman and all the Ken Holts which might have been written over the past couple of decades). For, like the Mind Reader, Grosset & Dunlap has erased the Rick Brant and Ken Holt mysteries from the shelves of bookstores and from the minds of succeeding generations.

The Blue Ghost Mystery was the first Rick Brant adventure I read. Not being notably proficient in science (read: science, D-, physics, Z, biology, "withdrawn"), I hesitated to become involved with rockets, electronics, and microscopes. The prose I liked to read was very direct and down-to-earth: "My fist crashed into his jaw." Anybody can understand that. However, title fifteen in the Brant series promised "mystery", and seated on the floor of Curtis Lindsay Books & Stationery over a quarter of a century ago, I investigated this first edition to see if it did indeed proffer an abundance of mystery and not too much of that D-minus stuff. It did, and it also turned out that series author Harold Goodwin was the only person on earth who could communicate to me on scientific subjects.

Who is the Blue Ghost? He’s the image of a Northern soldier in a Southern state, and also a man who presumes to rise above the natural order to assume the role of a supernatural man, timeless, immortal, inexorable, awe-inspiring. Since he cannot get what he wants honestly he tricks his audience with sensationalism. In a Hollywood-like letter to her brother, naïve Barbara Brant advertises the "show" he puts on: "Come right away" to a "ghastly" shocker, which she also plays up as "kind of romantic." In the worst tradition of Hollywood, the show will not satisfy with intelligence but will merely tease with repetition: "We regret there can only be one performance each evening."

The offense in Ghost is the cynical attitude of those whose entertainment is fabricated on the premise that they can influence large crowds by presenting grotesque masquerades in which a man switches not only roles but even uniforms. Ghost appeared the year after Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot advertised the erosion of subtlety in the cinema; what Wilder exploits for cheap laughs, Goodwin exposes as a cheap hoax. Hollywood represents the exploitation of emotions and the ripoff of romance; and in like manner, the hoods behind the Blue Ghost are transforming a national tragedy into a vulgar vehicle designed to increase their personal wealth.

There is role-reversal, too, in Barbara Brant being the one who has gone off to another state while Rick and Scotty stay home and tend to grocery shopping. In Whispering Box, Barby demanded a law mandating that girls must accompany their brothers on adventures. In Mind Reader, she participated in the adventure to an unprecedented degree; in Blue Ghost the adventure is hers and she summons her brother to it.

The ambiguousness of her response (like that of Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo, another story about someone who is nervously willing to be tricked by illusions) is such that she is simultaneously defends the show’s legitimacy and challenges her brother to undermine it. She relishes romance but doesn’t want to be the victim of a tasteless practical joke.

Her brother has never been know for taking things at face value. Rick Brant refuses to indulge the false romanticism of his sister; and peering through microscopes and plunging into dark caves, he insists on an intelligent explanation to what must be an insincere diversion. For here we are being served not the gimmicks of Victor Appleton but the ideas of Harold Goodwin.

Like the Blue Ghost movie, Hollywood films of the last twenty-three years have turned entertainment fields (drive-ins) into empty, deserted areas. Many a walk-in has also given up the ghost. Most of the natural storytellers are gone, replaced by ego-trippers who calmly blow $63 million on one cotton-headed flick (Francis Ford Flopola). And then, crossing the thin line between stupidity and insanity, the moguls rehire these fools. When a mogul sees an egg, his only response is: "Lay it again, Sam."

Rather than rushing forward and being obvious, Rick Brant decides the audience could use a hard dose of shock therapy and schemes to carry the movie-makers’ crudity to its logical extreme. He’s not even going to tell his sister about his plans: "Let her get a shock with the rest of the ghost fanciers." (p. 161)

With the hoods unmasked, the Blue Ghost ends his boffo run at one haunt. To see what’s playing in the future, patrons will have to check the lobby posters. (Fade out.)