Sinbad and Me. By Kin Platt.
Page Publishing. $26.99.
All those writers desperate
to connect with the so-called “young adult” audience – preteens and young
teenagers in particular – through hyper-“relevant” books steeped in modern
concerns such as split families, gender uncertainty and perfect racial-and-ethnic
balance of protagonists would do well to take a page from Kin Platt
(1911-2003). Platt was preoccupied with exactly none of those oh-so-up-to-date
matters when he created Sinbad and Me,
the first book of a trilogy about a mystery-solving boy and his bulldog. This
is actually the second book of a tetralogy if you count The Blue Man (1961), which also features Steve Forrest but
unconscionably omits Sinbad. The Edgar Award-winning Sinbad and
Me, now (finally!) available in a new edition, dates to 1966, with its
sequels being The Mystery of the Witch
Who Wouldn’t (1969) and The Ghost of
Hellsfire Street (1980).
And what will modern
sleuth-creating writers discover in Sinbad
and Me? They will learn that complex but fair-to-the-reader plotting,
amusing and well-wrought characters (even formulaic ones), and a whole series
of plot twists and turns, add up to a compulsively readable book that easily
outpaces most newer ones in its genre. In fact, they will learn that Sinbad and Me works despite being
somewhat frozen in its time, despite some inaccuracies, despite (or perhaps
because of) its clear resemblance to even earlier boy-detective books, such as those
featuring the Hardy Boys. They will
learn that a dog can be a full participant in a mystery/adventure while
remaining 100% dog, behaving in a realistically doglike manner: “When I got
back to the house I had a quick conference with man’s best friend. Sinbad
hadn’t been consulted all day but he wasn’t the type to bear a grudge. He lay
and listened and didn’t interrupt once.” There is nothing Scooby Doo-ish about
Sinbad, no almost-speech, no taking the lead and helping the rather dim humans around
him see what ought to be obvious. But Sinbad is nevertheless a full participant
in this mystery/adventure, and his presence is part of what makes Sinbad and Me stand out with such
distinction half a century after it was written.
Half a century does bring societal
changes, of course. The underlying premise of the novel, which involves Steve
being left on his own for a considerable time while his parents head out of
town to help relatives, is out of place in an age like ours, where tales of
hovering “helicopter parents” alternate with ones about “free-range parents”
whose children sometimes get taken away by authorities because the parents
allow them to (horrors!) walk home from school unsupervised. The use of printed
encyclopedias and the greatest code-breaking technology ever invented – the
human brain – seems impossibly quaint today, when people with half a brain or
less command enough computer power to solve just about any cipher. The idea of
bad guys zipping around in big stolen cars and making largely ineffectual, only
semi-scary threats, seems disturbingly over-familiar, to the point of cliché.
And having the bad guys use a snake as a weapon – in a scene that any herpetologist
would find laughably inaccurate – scarcely increases the story’s
verisimilitude.
But so what? Strict realism
has never been the point of young-adult adventures. Nowadays, “coming of age”
is the main thing that matters, but in Sinbad
and Me, what counts is something more straightforward: solving a mystery.
Yet the mystery itself is so convoluted that kids of any age (that includes the
grown-up kids known as adults) will be captivated by its ins and outs. There
are in fact multiple interlocking mysteries here: one involving a sunken
gambling ship, another having to do with a harmless “little old lady” who has
attracted the attention of some unsavory characters for no apparent reason,
another about a lawyer who is a little more close-mouthed than the facts would
seem to justify, another about a science teacher with a suspiciously intense
interest in skin diving in a certain area, and several concomitant and highly
specific mysteries of messages written in code in a cave and on a painting.
What Platt does in facile style and with a fine sense of pacing is to weave all
these mysteries into a single story built around 12-year-old Steve and his
bulldog, with a variety of subsidiary characters to spice up the narrative
(notably a sheriff who always seems to stumble upon Steve at just the wrong
moment). The result is a story that remains engrossing even though the societal
framework in which it is set is long gone – but great art, after all,
transcends its time, and if Sinbad and Me
is not exactly “great art,” that proves only that pretty doggone good art can
be transcendent, too, in its own dogged way.
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