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Alternative covers for Susan Pulls the Strings. Above, a scene from Chapter 6. Susan and the Carmichaels pursue a book thief on the London Underground. Susan unwittingly helped him to steal two rare books from the exhibition Miss Pershore took the cousins to on Boxing Day. Now she is determined to get them back. Below, a scene from Chapter 8, The Empty House Next Door. Susan slips on the ice at her first attempt at skating on the local pond.
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The Children's Press edition of Susan's Helping Hand depicts my favourite scene from the Susan series, when Susan has to deal with the runaway lawnmower at Cousin Barbara's farm in Kent. Below we can see the the frontispiece of the story from the original Collins edition. However, the scene is a little more crowded than described in the book. In the story, when Bella falls, Susan calls Cousin Barbara and Aunt Lucy. However, Aunt Lucy here has become a teenager with black hair and Midge or Charlotte seems to have appeared from nowhere! |
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Where is Susan? This second-last book in the series is every bit as good as the earlier titles, if not better. This story sees Susan and Midge on their way to Venice where they are going to meet up with Charlotte, now a student of art in Italy, having left St. Ronan's, and Susan's parents, who are returning from South Africa. However, things go wrong, and Susan and her cousin find that their reservations at the hotel have been cancelled. Literally chucked out on the street, as shown on the front cover, the girls are left to fend for themselves. They go to a boarding house and ride around the waterways in search of Charlotte. But there is a thief about and the ghastly Gascoignes are also on the loose. This is an excellent story, the only Jane Shaw novel set in Venice. The only downside is the cover. Because the story is set in Italy, the artist seems to have been under the impression that the girls were Italian! However, there is a sign that things were changing with the times. Midge is a child of the sixties now, wearing trousers (which would have been a definite no-no in the earlier stories, when one of the girls' major gripes was Selina Gascoigne wearing slacks). But I'll never get used to the idea of Midge with a deep suntan and black hair! |
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When she went to Brittany, the crazy French drivers must have left an impression on Jane Shaw because all her characters, be it by bus or by car, were startled by the crazy way the French motorists whizzed around at high speed. I too remember my Latin teacher at school, Miss Shaughnessy, telling me that when she was in France a bus driver couldn't get past a car, so he went out and broke off the car's mirror so that he could squeeze by. Starting with Sara and Caroline in 1939, right up to Susan and Midge is 1965, the very un-British and unorthodox French driving is a staple feature of the author's early chapters. However much she may have taken to the Breton natives, their driving is something that Jane Shaw never seems to have come to terms with. This picture, from Susan's Kind Heart, depicts the wild bus ride from Dinard to St. Clos. |
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When I reviewed Fourpenny Fair a few weeks ago, I posted only a small picture of the cover at an angle, so here is a high resolution scan. Here we can see Penny at the fair with Sid the little orphan boy. Penny is dressed in a suit of armor and walking around the fair to advertise the play that the boys from the orphanage are putting on. This scene is the best in the book and one of the best written in the whole Penny series. The review can be read at: http://wichwoodvillage.blogspot.com/2011/02/fourpenny-fair.html |
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Crooks Tour was the very first Jane Shaw book that I read, and it is one of the easiest books of hers to find. It was originally published by Collins in 1962 with the artwork shown above. When the book was reissued by The Children's Press a few years later, the girls' clothes were redrawn to look more modern, as you can see below. The story is a single title, not part of a series, recounting the adventures of Scottish school girls Ricky, Julie and Fay as they go on a school trip that takes them to France and Switzerland. Ricky, the blonde girl, is always on the lookout for crooks, hoping to unmask some master criminal's fiendish plots, and throughout the journey she imagines that crime is going on all around her. However, a little investigating shows that the alleged criminals are just oridnary people going about their business, resulting in a lot of teasing from Julie and Fay. However, in the end she does end up becoming unwittingly involved in a minor smuggling ring. Jane Shaw's son, Ian Evans, explains in Susan and Friends why there were so many smugglers in his mother's books: "...in those early postwar years, there were many complications [when travelling abroad] involving currency exchange, excise duty (hence the frequent smuggling themes in Jane Shaw!) and language barriers, few of which exist today". Along with Susan, Ricky became one of the author's most beloved characters, the idiosyncratic Scottish heroine. Crooks Tour is certainly one of Jane Shaw's best known and enjoyable books. |
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For the last few days I've been reading the second Sara and Caroline book, Bernese Adventure. The girls are sent home for an early holiday due to an oubreak of scarlet fever at their school. All their relatives apparently have plans to go abroad and view the sudden arrival of the girls as a major inconvenience. However, Caroline's elder sister, Vanessa, and her husband, John, more or less at gunpoint, agree to take the two girls to Switzerland, where John is going to a conference in Basle. A series of wonderful adventures follows, involving a cache of stolen diamonds. The girls travel all over Europe, including France, Belgium and Germany. There are many funny scenes, such as when Sara wakes up in the middle of the night to find that their room at a German gasthaus has been invaded by a curious baby cow. Hearty meals, despite John's efforts to economize, pepper the story, and a number of exciting events keep Jane Shaw's very first heroines on their toes as they grapple with crooks and all sorts of adventures, culminating in a dramatic showdown back in Dover. Sara has a wonderful time recounting her adventures to a group of hungry reporters. Caroline rounds off the story with a nonchalant quip. This is the most exciting of the Sara and Caroline stories. |
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Above: Lindy and Mitzy set out on their nocturnal mission to retrieve a couple of pots that were made by a temperamental local artist and sold by mistake.
Jumble Sale, published in the Collins Girls' Annual 1963, is notable because it was Jane Shaw's last short story. Set in the sleepy village of Willow Green, near Maidstone, it stars fifteen-year-old Lindy, her friend Jill and Jill's slightly older brother David. During the summer holidays, they are bored, and wish that something exciting would happen. There has been a spate of so-called Country House Burglaries at Lockesley Castle, fifty miles away, but that's about as near as excitement gets to their village. Lindy is excited at the prospect of being a bridesmaid at her sister's wedding, but Jennifer and her fiancé Tim keep putting it off due to a lack of funds, so the prospect appears to be dwindling. Lindy is also rather taken by an attractive young artist, Mark Lamont, and secretly dreams of marrying him in the distant future. But since Mark isn't proposing just yet, the teenagers agree to help out at the local jumble sale by gathering donations for and working at the White Elephant stall. Most villagers promise to give them some old relics and even Mark Lamont agrees to make a donation. On the day of the sale, David goes to the artist's house and mistakenly carries off two beautiful pots of African violets instead of a pile of junk Mark had left for him. Tim buys the pots as a gift for Jennifer and carries them off to his surgery. Mark Lamont arrives at the stall in a rage, accusing David of stealing the pots and demanding their return. When Tim refuses to give them back, David concocts a plan to break into his surgery and steal the pots. This results in a midnight excursion by the three teens and Lindy's noisy dachshund puppy, Mitzy. Arriving at the surgery, David discovers that he has grown too big to squeeze through the window, so Lindy is elected to break in instead. In the dark room, she is frightened out of her wits by Hector, a skeleton that Tim used when studying anatomy. She raises the roof with her screams and knocks down the pots, breaking them. Tim charges in to see what is going on and, lo and behold, they discover the reason why Lamont had been so angry about losing his pots, for concealed in the earth is a cache of diamonds, the fruits of a recent Country House Robbery. Lamont is clapped in jail, and the kids receive a huge reward, enabling Jennifer and Tim to tie the knot and Jill and Lindy to be bridesmaids. However, Lindy is a bit upset that she will have to wait a bit longer for Mr. Right to come along.
This story was a fine conclusion to more than two decades of contributions to the Collins annuals. Starting in 1941 with Amanda's Spies, Jane Shaw had been a regular contributor over the years. Sometimes her stories included her most famous characters (Susan, Sara & Caroline, and Ricky, Julie & Fay), while on other occasions, she created new characters for a one-off appearance, as is the case here. Jumble Sale has all the classic Jane Shaw elements: the unlikely coincidence of her characters unmasking a crook, a quiet country setting hit by a crimewave, an adventure stemming from a pretty mundane event like a jumble sale or fair, a treasure and a handsome reward. The characterization is very good, even in the case of minor characters like Lindy's mother. All in all, an excellent story.
Below: Lindy enters the surgery, unaware of the skeleton lurking behind her!
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Jeff and Heather at Peakirk Books came through once again with an excellent copy of The Moochers. This book and its sequel The Moochers Aborad were published in 1950 and 1951, respectively, just before the first Susan book saw the light of day. A third book, Moochers and Prefects, was written in 1951 and the only copy was sent to Lutterworth Press. They later forwarded it to West Regional TV for consideration, but their staff lost it. A pity that the computer technology we enjoy today was not available back then, as a back-up would have been kept for security reasons. Returning to published works, the first Moochers book was set in Cornwall, the only novel of hers to be set there, unless you count The Penhallow Mystery (1967), for which she used the pen name Jean Bell. It is surprising that only this story and Family Trouble are set in Cornwall, since this region was a regular holiday resort for the author and her family for many years. The Moochers Abroad is the second of four books set in Binic in Brittany (preceded, of course, by Breton Holiday (1939), reissued as Breton Adventure, and followed by Twopence Coloured (1954) and Susan's Kind Heart (1965). From the wording of the title, it seems that Moochers and Prefects was a school story. Whether it was as good as the excellent Susan at School and Susan's Trying Term, one can only imagine. A sad loss. But maybe it will turn up someday among some long neglected papers of a West Regional TV employee. |
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A view of The Moochers from a different angle and, below, the cover of The Moochers Abroad, which I also purchased this week, this time from Pat Barrett Books in Abbots Bromley, Staffordshire. Pat also had a copy of New House at Northmead, and I snapped that up too. All in, I've got a fair number of books on the way: the two Dizzy & Alison books, the two Moochers Books, New House at Northmead, Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox and Magic Ships. That should keep me busy for a while! |
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Yesterday, I ordered three books from Jeff at Peakirk Books: Nothing Happened After All, Magic Ships and The Moochers. I would prefer to read the books in the order that they were published but when dealing with an out-of-print author you have to take what is available. So I'll be reading the second Dizzy & Alison book before the first (Anything Can Happen). Prices are soaring. For The Moochers I paid £65 and for Nothing Happened After All I paid £70. Magic Ships was a realtive snip at £30. I've found copies of Northmead Nuisance at prices varying between £170 and £250. In October 2009, I paid £80 for a first edition of A Job for Susan. At the time I thought it was quite expensive but now the asking price is as high as £130. Rare titles can be incredibly dear. The Moochers Abroad is going for £140. If you're looking to collect the more difficult to find Jane Shaw books, prepare your pocket! |
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This is an illustration from Jane Shaw's very first published short story, Amanda's Spies. It appeared in the Collins' Girls' Annual 1941. The story is set in Loch Ard, Scotland and features two girls: Amanda, the eccentric heroine, and her friend Elizabeth. Amanda, after reading a report in the newspapers about a woman single-handedly disarming and capturing a Nazi spy, wishes that she could have a similar exciting adventure and begins to imagine that spies or stray German parachutists could be on the loose in this unlikely location. It is a good, but not brilliant, story with many of the Jane Shaw traits and twists. However, Amanda and Elizabeth were not destined to grace the pages of later annuals.
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A photo of Loch Ard. Hard to imagine Nazi spies around here!
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The Adventures of a Snowman was originally published in the Collins' Girls' Annual 1954, above, and was reprinted in the Crackerjack Book for Girls in 1959, below. For reasons unexplained, the story is not included in Susan and Friends: The Jane Shaw Companion. This may be because it is a story for younger children or because it does not fit into any of the sections of the book, i.e., Jane Shaw's France or Jane Shaw's South Africa. However, the annuals are currently available from several booksellers in the UK, Canada and Australia, and are not very high in price. |
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Set in a small village in the north of Cornwall, near Bude, this short story, published in 1961 in the Collins' Girls' Annual, stars Nicky, daughter of the local vicar, her three sisters and their neighbours the Trevelyans. Jane Shaw was clearly a real asset to Collins by this time, with the popularity of the Susan books at their zenith and Crooks Tour in the works, ensuring lavish illustrations for her short stories.
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While climbing a tree, Nicky falls on Edward Trevelyan as he returns from a term at university. She is surprised to find him much changed. Unusual for a Jane Shaw story, the sixteen-year-old girl is immediately smitten by Edward. One of the few stories to contain a real romantic element, this story is also a departure from the typical JS style because it is told in the first person. This style was used in only a handful of her tales, most notably Susan's School Play, A Girl with Ideas and the Thomas books. In Family Trouble it works very well, as Nicky's thought processes are the key to all the humour in the story.
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In addition to the romantic theme, there is a typical Jane Shaw mystery afoot. Little sister Tubs excitedly tells her family that the police are on the lookout for an escaped convict from Dartmoor.
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On the way to the local carnival, Nicky, dressed as a witch, bumps into her other little sister Ruth, who is dressed up as a Christmas cracker!
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| Nicky and her sisters have captured the convict. Or have they? |
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There has to be a happy ending for Nicky in her only appearance in a Jane Shaw story. A pity we never see her again. The family had potential...
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The annual the story appeared in. Very nice cover. My copy has the following dedication on the inside front cover: To Libby, from Mummy, Xmas 1962. Poor Libby, whoever she was, doesn't appear to have had very loving parents!
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The cover of a book for very young readers, Left-Handed Tumfy, published by Lutterworth in 1962, illustrated by Gwyneth Mamlock.
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