Adults Without a Clue

The Clue of the Dead Duck

Scott Young
Toronto: Little, Brown, 1962
159 pages

Morgan Perdue and Albert "Young Ab" Magee are up to no good. They've taken advantage of a trip taken by Black Ab – he's Young Ab's dad – to skip school and do a little illegal duck hunting. Friend Sally Connors wanted to join them, but the boys had waved her off. Morgan and Young Ab leave well before dawn, piloting a boat down Irishman's River to the very same floating bog Black Ab uses when hunting duck. No sooner do they arrive than they are attacked and Morgan is knocked out.

The boy regains consciousness to find Young Ab and the boat gone. He spends a long cold day on the bog before being rescued by Sally. She'd grown concerned when the boys hadn't returned. Morgan's rescue sets off a futile search for Young Ab. The Ontario Provincial Police are called in, the RCAF sends a helicopter from CFB Trenton, and yet there is no sign of the missing boy. 

There's suspicion from the start. Morgan Perdue is a foster child. He's spent his childhood being shuttled from place to place by Children's Aid. Morgan considers his two years at the Magee house the best he's ever lived, which is something given that the period coincides with Mrs Magee's sudden illness and death. Though no one blames the boy for her passing, Young Ab's Aunt Winnie has always considered Morgan a bad seed. She's certain he's hiding what really happened on Irishman's River:

"Are you sure you and Young Ab didn't didn't have some kind of an argument and then that that [sic] temper of yours didn't get the better of you?"

Detective Sergeant Bower of the OPP has a similar theory. A grim, unfriendly man he isn't so much intent on investigating as obtaining an a confession.

It's this treatment of Morgan, this terrible prejudice, that lends weight to what would otherwise be just another adventure story for children. The boy wants to clear his name, but more than anything he wants to find his friend.

The children of The Clue of the Dead Duck come off so much better than their elders. Sally proves herself a capable, loyal friend. Pearl, Young Ab's little sister comforts Morgan as the adults point fingers. Meanwhile, Morgan somehow manages to find the strength to continue his quest in the face of insinuations and accusations levelled by the adults. His actions, not those of the police, lead to the break in the case and the arrests of the persons responsible for Young Ab's disappearance. 

The Clue of the Dead Duck is the sixth book in Little, Brown's Secret Circle series. A strange name, don't you think? It suggests a group of crime solvers, like the Three Investigators, yet the books have no recurring characters. What they do have in common is Arthur Hammond, who not only served as the series' general editor, but provided plot outlines for each title. The subtle social commentary of The Clue of the Dead Duck sets it apart from Max Braithwaite's The Mystery of the Muffled Man, the only other Secret Circle book I've read. Whether this is the result of Young's influence or that of Hammond, a man known for his social activism, is a matter of further research. Ultimately, credit goes to the author. Sketching out a story is one thing, writing this is quite another: 

The last thing Young Ab said before he went to sleep was that the alarm was set for four o'clock and that we'd better get some sleep.
     But sometimes when I'm just about to go to sleep things seem very clear to me. If I've done something wrong during the day, it's in those few minutes before I go to sleep that I worry about it. Now I started thinking, suppose there's an accident? Suppose somebody gets shot? The faces of all the people I knew around Irishman's Lake, all the people who accepted me right now because I was under Black Ab's protection, came up in my mind. But as I  lay therein the dark, these faces seemed to be looking at me accusingly. Old ladies had their heads bent together and were looking out of the corners of their eyes at me, and I was scared.

Sadly, The Clue of the Dead Duck remains relevant. It hasn't aged.

Note: The Clue of the Dead Duck was read for the 1962 Club. Reviews by fellow club members can be found through this link.

Other books from 1962 reviewed here over the years:

Canada 1962

The Damned and the Destroyed - Kenneth Orvis

Four Days - John Buell

Lust Planet - Olin Ross [W.E.D. Ross]

The Mystery of the Muffled Man - Max Braithwaite

The Ravine - Kendal Young [Phyllis Brett Young]

Object: A well-constructed hardcover with series design. The eight illustrations, cover included, are by Douglas Johnson. I purchased my copy last year at Craigy Muir Curiousities in Spencerville, Ontario. Price: $5.00.

 

Access: Very few copies are listed for sale online – prices range from US$6.00 to US$13.96. Note that not one features the dust jacket.

In 1981, The Clue of the Dead Duck was reissued as a Seal mass market paperback. As far as I've been able to determine, it was a split run with Scholastic Canada. These editions are being sold by pretend booksellers like Thriftbooks at prices ranging from US$30.42 to $42.48.

Related posts:

Yeah, I Know the Muffled Man

Christmas With Neil Young's Dad

Teamwork

Yeah, I Know the Muffled Man

The Mystery of the Muffled Man

Max Braithwaite

Toronto: Little, Brown, 1962

160 pages

Fifty-five years ago, The Mystery of the Muffled Man vied with Joe Holliday's Dale of the Mounted in Hong Kong as a Christmas gift for young, bookish nephews. I doubt either won, but it would not surprise

me if the former achieved greater sales. After thirteen volumes, Holliday's Dale of the Mounted books were getting tired; I think it worth noting that the Hong Kong adventure would be his last. Braithwaite's, on the other hand, was part of the Secret Circle, a new and exciting series driven by a survey of booksellers, librarians, teachers and, most importantly, Scarborough school children and their parents.

Results in hand, General Editor Arthur Hammond, set about recruiting what was described in a November 1962 press release as "the best available Canadian authors."

It seems that most were too busy.

The Secret Circle stable was very small,  containing veteran workhorses like Robert Collins, Lawrence Earl, David Gammon, and Scott Young. Hammond himself contributed two of the series' twelve books, while dictating length, plot points, and endings for the others.

The extent of Hammond's influence on The Mystery of the Muffled Man might make for an interesting paper, but I'm not the one to write it. Braithwaite's first novel, preceding Why Shoot the Teacher by three years, this one is a bit of a bore. It begins with a chilly wait for a train in

a northern Ontario mining town. Young Chris Summerville has been sent by his parents to meet his cousin, equally-young Carol Fitzpatrick, who will be visiting while her parents spend the Christmas holidays in Bermuda. Eventually, the train arrives, but before Chris meets Carol there is an altercation that will hang over the remainder of the novel. Chris's overly-friendly dog, Arthur, runs to greet the new arrivals, only to be clubbed by a "muffled man" who had emerged from the train. Carol later tells her cousin of some suspicious behaviour the muffled man exhibited on the train: pouring over maps, avoiding RCMP officers, and pretending to have a broken left arm.

There's little more worth reporting, except to say that The Mystery of the Muffled Man is a novel bereft of mystery. The character who clubs a dog is obviously the villain. Why is he in the northern Ontario mining town? Well, the only thing we know of the area's history is that there had been a bank robbery ten years earlier, and that the money was never found.

By far the most interesting thing about the novel is how little the muffled man figures. Accompanied by friend Dumont LePage, Chris and Carol decide to go ice fishing, get lost in the woods, climb an old fire tower to get their bearings, and discover an abandoned gold mine. After a cave-in separates him from the rest of the group, Chris sees the muffled man digging to retrieve the stolen loot and empties the bullets from his unattended rifle. Chris's father and two RCMP officers show up in the nick of time, resulting in this climactic passage:

"You stay here with the boy," Constable Scott said to Mr Summerville. "We'll deal with him." And, holding their guns at the ready, the two uniformed men moved down the tunnel.
     In five minutes it was over. The muffled man, trapped by the wall of fallen stone, and with an empty gun in his hands, was quickly overpowered.

Before dismissing The Mystery of the Muffled Man as the weakest novel read this year, it's only fair to acknowledge that it wasn't written with me in mind. The survey that informed the Secret Circle was conducted before I was even born. What's more, I've never so much as considered living in Scarborough.

Trivia: Jack McClelland once encouraged a hard-up Norman Levine to contribute to the series.

Object: A compact hardcover with eight illustrations of varying quality by Joseph Rosenthal. My copy, not nearly so nice as the one pictured above, was purchased three years ago at a London book store. Price: 60¢

Access: WorldCat records a grand total of two Canadian libraries holding the Little, Brown edition. It also lists a 1981 Bantam-Seal paperback, and something titled The Muffled Man (Scarborough: Nelson, 1990).

Interestingly, no copies of the Bantam-Seal and Nelson editions are on offer from online booksellers. The original Little, Brown came and went with a single printing. Though not many copies are listed online, it is cheap. Very Good copies begin at US$8.00. At US$30.10, the most expensive is an inscribed copy offered by an Ontario bookseller.

Remarkably, the novel has been translated into Dutch (Avontuur in een goudmijn) and Swedish (Mysteriet med den maskerade mannen).

Related posts:

Braithwaite's True First

Condensed CanLit
Dale's Dumb Luck; or, A Mountie Messes Up