The Bob-Whites Hit the Big Apple in The Mystery of the Blinking Eye

I’ve been to New York City a couple of times and spent just enough time there to know that you could stay a year and not get the full experience of everything the city has to offer. Intriguing sights await on every corner. As a vacation destination for a group of chummy teens, it’s “wonderfully wonderful,” to use the phrase favored by Barbara, one of three faraway friends who flies to New York to meet up with the Bob-Whites in The Mystery of the Blinking Eye, the twelfth book in the Trixie Belden series. But just sight-seeing like a typical tourist is not sufficient for intrepid 14-year-old super-sleuth Trixie. She has a knack for stumbling into mysteries wherever she goes, and here in the Big Apple, she blunders her way into a humdinger.

Earlier books in the series have established that Trixie has rather eccentric tastes, so it’s not too surprising when she goes gaga for an ugly Incan idol she discovers in an antique shop. What’s more startling is the fact that her peculiar souvenir has attracted the intense interest of some pretty shady characters. Trixie and her fellow Bob-Whites – sweet best friend Honey, grandiloquent Mart, practical Brian, gallant Jim, elegant Diana and reformed Dan – have all been to New York before, but they’re thrilled to be giving their Iowan pals – twins Barbara and Bob and their neighbor Ned – the grand tour. But whether they’re taking a carriage ride through Central Park, perusing the Museum of Natural History or ascending the Empire State Building, shadowy men lurk nearby, and they clearly want that statue for themselves. Why? And how can Trixie stop it from falling into those nefarious hands?

The questions of what’s so special about this knick-knack and who these men are should pose quite enough mystery for one volume, but the ghost writer adopting the name Kathryn Kenny for this volume decided to make things even more enigmatic by introducing yet another odd element: a prophecy given to Trixie by an elderly fortune teller she assists in the airport. More precisely, the woman gives Trixie a purse, and in the purse is a poem written in Spanish. Trixie’s curiosity consumes her, and she begs Miss Trask, Honey’s former governess who is serving as chaperone on this trip, to translate it into English for her.

When I was in high school, I wrote rhyming poems in French for the school’s literary magazine on two occasions. I then translated them into English. And let me tell you, it was a heck of a lot easier to write the poem from scratch – even in another language – than to translate it and leave both form and meaning intact. But what does Miss Trask do? She sits down with a pen and paper and painstakingly translates that poem. Ten couplets and, for no particular reason I can discern, one set of three rhyming lines. Half an hour later, she has a poem that sounds a lot like gibberish but nonetheless rhymes perfectly and displays nearly seamless iambic tetrameter throughout. Either Miss Trask is some kind of poetry translating savant or this little feat is just as unbelievable as the contents of the poem itself.

Trixie sees the prophecy as a treasure map of sorts, a guide to unfolding events, though it only ever seems to make any sense in retrospect. What the poem mostly does is serve as a structure for the book, with something in every chapter corresponding to a couplet or two. It’s awfully involved for a prediction, and it’s mostly just a series of abstract images. As Miss Trask firmly states late in the book, “A person can twist words to get almost any meaning out of them he wants.” Trixie may have her career path all laid out before her, but if for some reason she decides she’d rather pursue something less harrowing than detective work, she’s got a real future as an English major. She certainly displays an aptitude for making tenuous connections.

Poetry comes into play in a more natural way as Bob and Barbara entertain first their friends, then a wider audience with tragic ballads they wrote themselves. Between the prophecy and the songs, which have a certain folksy charm about them, particularly considering that they were supposed to have been written by teenagers, that’s a lot more rhyming than I’ve seen in any other Trixie Belden book. This leads me to suspect that this particular Kathryn Kenny was a frustrated poet.

Along with the poetry, literary references abound here. Sherlock Holmes gets a nod in almost every book, and this is no exception. We’ve also got Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and Hans Christian Andersen, and Mart made me chuckle by mentioning the mighty mouthful Mephistopheles, since I imagine that the unwieldy nature of the name is the main reason he brought it up. My biggest smile, though, came early in the book when, during a trip to Central Park, the Bob-Whites-plus-three observe several park-goers floating boats out on the nearby pond. I immediately thought of Stuart Little, so I laughed aloud when, a couple paragraphs down, Honey said, in reference to a boy with a boat, “He makes me think of Stuart Little in E. B. White’s book.” Right there with ya, Honey…

This is the first time that all seven Bob-Whites have taken a trip together. Indeed, Dan, who made his first appearance in the eighth book, all but dropped out of the series for the next three, so it’s nice to see him so involved here. He’s lost the angst that he had when we first met him, but he remembers his street rat days well enough to play a vital role when Trixie tangles with a tough crowd in a scene that makes her ill-advised trip to the Skid Row of Sleepside, NY, in the fourth book look like a cakewalk. Mart treats his buddies to a magic show; Diana shares an unsettling experience with Trixie at the Empire State Building. Everyone has at least one moment in the spotlight.

Other characters still have room to emerge, however. Along with the affable Ned and Bob and the exuberant Barbara, we’ve got Honey’s father and those shifty men who keep tailing Trixie. The most memorable new character is Dr. Joe Reed, a physician and family friend who invites the teens over to have a look at his model railroad. I grinned as I imagined Big Bang Theory’s locomotive-loving Sheldon Cooper geeking out over the intricate display. And speaking of geeking out, I love the way that normally reserved Brian wears his Hippocratic passion on his sleeve when Dr. Reed shows them around the hospital where he works.

For those whose passions include the Bob-Whites, The Mystery of the Blinking Eye is really the first book in the series to integrally involve all seven of them, and certainly the first away-from-home adventure to include them all. Between that and the exciting setting, this is a great installment, even with that absurd prophecy underpinning their New York adventure.