The Nose Knows

Now this is a blast from the past. When I was very young, I really loved a series of books about the McGurk Mysteries - about a gang of kids who solved, if not crimes as such, then definitely mysterious puzzles. They were really great, and it was a source of great annoyance to me that the library at Horncastle didn't have two of the books listed on the back. I was missing some mysteries! These are the editions I knew, but it seems there were plenty of different versions with different illustrations...

And it turns out I was missing more than I thought I was! Everyone needs to check out these YouTube videos by Sean, who shares my love of Chromobots and was decent enough to remind me of the wonders of McGurk! And there were way more than the eight books I was aware of in my younger days! I need to track them all down now and read them again!

I still only remember a few bits of the stories - now I've seen those videos, I'm fairly sure the ones the library was missing were The Nervous Newsboy and The Rabbit Rip-Off, and I read the rest of the first eight. I only remember a few particularly clever bits - Willie's flamboyant hand-kissing as an excuse to sniff people's hands, Brains claiming to be able to analyse handwriting but actually guessing who wrote what by what they wrote instead of how they wrote it, the invisible dog, and other little parts, but I'd love to refresh my memories and see what happened to the gang in later years!

Fascinatingly, it seems the author, E.W. Hildick, was British, writing about America. It's interesting, because as far as I can remember the stories were distinctly American in tone, but not so foreign as to be confusing or off-putting to an English reader who knew next to nothing about the USA (or, for that matter, anywhere much more than ten miles from his home). But maybe it'll feel different if I read them again, because I know I was surprised by another book I liked when I was young...

The Dragon Circle, by Stephen Krensky. I read it when I was very small, and I'm not sure if this copy that still lives on my bookshelves is the same one I had when I was young or one I found at a later date - you'd think I WOULD remember that, but you know what my memory's like. In any case, I liked it when I was tiny, either hung on to it or bought a new one when I found it in a charity shop, and read it again as an adult. And this book is VERY American! It's explicitly set in America, even though it's all about dragons and magic, and makes the point repeatedly that the dragons have relocated to America for the purposes of this book. I didn't remember anything about that at all! I remembered it as being a fun story about a magical family and the dragons they encounter, and as being the kind of thing that might well have happened right on my doorstep. To read it again and find it's chock-full of Americanisms (the very first page says it happens in Westbridge, Massachusetts and talks about the Salem Witch Trials, for crying out loud!) was a real shock to the system. Had I just blanked that whole aspect of it out of my memory?

So maybe I'll be equally shocked by the McGurk books if I rediscover them and read them again? I need to track them down, anyway!