The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke

Some of these Alfred Hitchcock tales were pretty short, and beelined to the big twist right away. I loved that-like I was in the story with the characters. So the writer clearly intended me the reader to be in on the fun. They were all about the red herrings, the twists, the misdirection. So my report of its demise is greatly exaggerated.Īlfred Hitchcock’s Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful et al.Ĭollections of short stories-or “tales” as they called them. Except that now, thanks to the Internet, I discover that this “mystery” book not only survives, but is well reviewed and highly rated on Goodreads, and obviously speaks to new generations. Twelve toy soldiers discovered beneath the floorboards, that come alive. For me, that only adds to the appeal and the magic of the book. The Return of the Twelves by Pauline ClarkĮveryone has one of these “mystery books” in their past-meaning, the mystery of a great, transformational book that seemingly no one else has ever heard, that no one else has read, that seems to have disappeared from the world. But such an integral part of my treehouse experience I’d be remiss not to include it-or not to mention that in its Star Trek spoofs, when Kirk and Spock “beamed up” and always ended up with their limbs rearranged, it cracked me up every time. But the lesson of that book was as simple as it was profound: there’s really no such thing as a boy’s or girl’s book. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson BurnettĪssigned reading. You go under a sensor and a bill comes in the mail.) No clerk stuck in that tiny cage with all the cash in the drawer.

(Today, sadly, all tollbooths are phantom! No longer a basket to toss your quarter into. So wait, a book can have puns and dumb jokes and asides and the story can still carry you along? That made a big impression on me, that the writer would trust me that way. Milo reaches the Island of Conclusions by jumping to it, of course, and learns about time not from a ticking watch but a ticking watchdog, etc.

Good lesson for a budding fiction writer! Wait-time imagined as a straight line, like a piece of string, and suddenly you take two points on that string and connect them to each other in order to time travel? Cool! I was very open to reasonable sounding explanations whose seeming reasonableness fluently hid their absurdity and impossibility.

The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke