(++++) MINOR-LEAGUE MYSTERIES

Secret Spy Society 1: The Case of the Missing Cheetah. By Veronica Mang. Viking. $13.99.

Secret Spy Society 2: The Case of the Curious Scouts. By Veronica Mang. Viking. $13.99.

Secret Spy Society 3: The Case of the Musical Mishap. By Veronica Mang. Viking. $14.99.

     No Sherlock Holmes stuff here. No major derring-do (or even derring-don’t). No high-level dangers or implications of genuine evil. And that is just as things should be in an alternate-world set of spy tales for the very youngest detective aficionados (or soon-to-be aficionados) – ages 5-9. Victoria Mang has a very clever concept here. First, she assembles a team of three girls who are themselves firmly in or near the target age range of the books: Dot, Peggy and Rita. Then she assigns them easily distinguishable personality characteristics without really doing any character development – too much of that would be ineffective for this age range. And then – here’s the cleverness – she apprentices the three budding detectives to a secret group of top-notch female spies from many time periods and many locations, who never met each other in the real world but in this world are all comrades working together for the greater good of everyone.

     Best not to examine the adult portion of the Secret Spy Society books too closely, since just what the spy pros are doing and why is never explained – and does not matter, since the whole focus of the books is on the apprentices and what they are doing. Mang’s abundant, nicely designed if rather formulaic-for-kids’-books illustrations neatly advance the stories while making these easy-to-read chapter books even easier to read. And she draws on the real lives of some of the adult spies to just the extent necessary to get the books’ plots going and give Dot, Peggy and Rita something into which they can sink their investigatory teeth. That is almost literally the case in the first book, The Case of the Missing Cheetah, which is all about the kidnaping (or cheetah-napping) of Chiquita, the actual name of an actual cheetah belonging to Josephine Baker (1906-1975), one of the adult spies and a woman of remarkable (and, to some, scandalous) accomplishments. One stormy night (Mang suggests but does not go so far as to write “it was a dark and stormy night”), Dot, Peggy and Rita notice a woman walking along the street who turns out to be their teacher, Miss Khan – based on Noor Inayat Khan (1914-1944), a World War II wireless operator captured and killed by the Nazis. By following Miss Khan and offering to return the fountain pen she has conveniently (for the plot) dropped, the girls encounter the Secret Spy Society and help the adults find Chiquita, who has been nefariously caged by a nefarious next-door neighbor for nefarious reasons that are never explained because, really, they are not the point. What is the point is that the girls’ assistance earns them the designation of Petite Private Eyes and the opportunity to solve additional simple mysteries.

     Mang continues the pattern and gives the evildoers slightly more understandable motives in the second and brand-new third books of the series. The Case of the Curious Scouts picks up, in a way, on the first book, since in the initial volume, the girls gain entry to the bad guy’s house by pretending to be scouts selling cookies. The second book picks up with a strange robbery at the store of two local fashion designers – an event that leads Dot, Peggy and Rita to go undercover to infiltrate a scout troop that is doing some very strange things to earn merit badges. The girls’ primary guide this time is Virginia Hall (1906-1982), who, in the real world, lost a leg in a hunting accident but still worked as a World War II spy and for the CIA – and used her artificial leg, which she called Cuthbert (and to which she gives the same name in Mang’s book), as an aid in her undercover work. There is an odd little inaccuracy regarding Hall in The Case of the Curious Scouts, as Hall tells the girls that she used to slip secret notes “into my metal ankle” – when in fact her leg was entirely made of wood, and she put notes in her leg’s wooden heel. But details of this sort are not at all the point of The Case of the Curious Scouts, which turns out to involve a troop leader who redefines merit badges in such a way as to get scouts to do her housework and make her the Scout Leader of the Year (for which ceremony she needs a new dress that she steals, connecting the scouting material to the theft that opens the book). The whole plot is wholly improbable and on the silly side, but it cements the friendship of Dot, Peggy and Rita with each other and with their adult mentors, which is what matters.

     The third book, The Case of the Musical Mishap, tosses in a tiny touch of reality by taking place in the school attended by all three of the Petite Private Eyes – showing young readers that even in this make-believe world, kid detectives do not get to spend all their time helping famous adult spies solve little mysteries. If the second book focuses on going undercover, the third centers more on codes (although Morse code was also a factor in the first novel). The idea here is that the girls all play instruments in the school band, whose big concert is coming up – but then various band instruments start mysteriously disappearing, and if they are not found and restored to band members, the concert will be ruined. Mr. Vollrath, the band teacher, is a sourpuss who does not like Peggy, or at least Peggy’s tendency to show off when playing the trombone. And Rita has a school-based problem to handle: the band concert is the same day as a math-club competition in which Rita is also supposed to participate. Of course, as the story progresses, it turns out that the math and band issues are intertwined – and that elementary-school students can be just as nefarious as adults (which is to say, not very nefarious). The adult-spy-in-focus here is Elizebeth Friedman (1892-1980), a cryptanalyst who assists the Secret Spy Society even though she is not officially a member of it. Her tie-in with the Petite Private Eyes is that she is the former principal of their school – spies are just about everywhere in Mang’s characters’ world. The Case of the Musical Mishap also reinforces one of the underlying themes of these books – that the girls have to work together, with their friendship uniting their differing (but always complementary) abilities. Mang makes this point by having Peggy go off on her own in one exploratory direction, leaving Dot and Rita to look at and into things differently. Of course, the mystery is solved only after all three girls get back together.

     There is nothing difficult to read or difficult to understand in the Secret Spy Society books, and their educational value is confined to their final pages, which give brief biographical information on the real-world adult spies and provide some detail on concepts such as codes and disguises. Readers who enjoy these fantasy young-detective stories may perhaps be inspired by the biographical material to read about the reality of some of the spies’ lives. If those readers do not find these women’s true stories deeply intriguing, that would be a real mystery.