The same but different
Mar. 21st, 2010 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraE.W. Hildick, Jim Starling Goes to Town (re-read).
Pamela Brown, Blue Door Venture (re-read).
Both of these are books in which a group of British youngsters (with other adventures chronicled in earlier books in the series) are defrauded by flashy London conmen, and through their own efforts track down the men responsible and have their resourcefulness rewarded. Having said that, there are some key differences. Blue Door Venture was published in 1949, and the children in it, although described as such, are old enough to be working in their theatre full-time, having completed theatrical training; the town they live in is Fenchester, which I presume is somewhere near Cambridge (I haven’t got the other books handy to check for cross-references, but somewhere in the Home Counties), and their interactions with their remarkably tolerant parents as well as with the locals in Cornwall place them clearly in the middle class. Jim Starling, however, and his Last Apple Gang, are from 1963 and from Smogbury, a mill town two hundred miles north of London, younger (still at school), and definitely working class.
The Blue Doors are defrauded by Lucky, who offers himself as a (highly successful) stage manager for their Christmas panto and then absconds with the takings; fortunately for them, he makes a habit of targeting theatres, and they eventually track him down (the girls take jobs in small Cornish theatres while the boys hang out in scuzzy London cafes drinking either strong tea or coffee made from essence. The Last Apple Gang, down in London for the football final, fall for a scalper’s offer to trade their tickets for his apparently better (and actually faked) ones, and track him down through various boarding houses, with a bit more violence (the boys get captured by the scalper’s gang) and a rather nice scene involving a rescue by railway porters shouting, “Mind the doors!” (the boys are staying with Goggle’s Uncle Pancras, who works as a porter at the station where he was found as a baby).
Both of them are also rather difficult to find. There are seven books in the Jim Starling series, of which I read five when I was young. All borrowed from the library, and my battered copy of Jim Starling Goes to Town (the only one I own) I picked up from that library’s book sale – none of the others are still in the catalogue. A few were reprinted in paperback and are available relatively cheaply, but if I want the first (and my favourite – it had a huge impact on me as a child) in the series – Jim Starling – it’s going for $NZ170-$450 on bookfinder. The first in the Blue Door series is The Swish of the the Curtain, which has had multiple reprints and is easy enough to find, but Blue Door Venture – which I picked up, I think, from a sale at a second-hand furniture shop for about $5 (it’s priced in pencil at 7/6) – hasn’t been reprinted and is $180-odd for the few copies available.
I have a patchy working knowledge of prices and collectability and children’s fiction – I knew the Jim Starlings were hard to find, but I had no idea about Blue Door Venture until I checked when writing this. I do acquire series, but I’m not a collector – I want to read the book, first of all, and I get annoyed by how high prices make it very difficult for me or anyone else to do so (I very rarely spend over $NZ100 for any single book). I suspect Blue Door Venture’s never been reprinted because it’s not all that good, but that’s not all that helpful if you can’t find it to check. And libraries are getting rid of older stock, which is great for me personally if I get to pick it up cheaply, but in the broader sense of things limits the number of other readers.
Pamela Brown, Blue Door Venture (re-read).
Both of these are books in which a group of British youngsters (with other adventures chronicled in earlier books in the series) are defrauded by flashy London conmen, and through their own efforts track down the men responsible and have their resourcefulness rewarded. Having said that, there are some key differences. Blue Door Venture was published in 1949, and the children in it, although described as such, are old enough to be working in their theatre full-time, having completed theatrical training; the town they live in is Fenchester, which I presume is somewhere near Cambridge (I haven’t got the other books handy to check for cross-references, but somewhere in the Home Counties), and their interactions with their remarkably tolerant parents as well as with the locals in Cornwall place them clearly in the middle class. Jim Starling, however, and his Last Apple Gang, are from 1963 and from Smogbury, a mill town two hundred miles north of London, younger (still at school), and definitely working class.
The Blue Doors are defrauded by Lucky, who offers himself as a (highly successful) stage manager for their Christmas panto and then absconds with the takings; fortunately for them, he makes a habit of targeting theatres, and they eventually track him down (the girls take jobs in small Cornish theatres while the boys hang out in scuzzy London cafes drinking either strong tea or coffee made from essence. The Last Apple Gang, down in London for the football final, fall for a scalper’s offer to trade their tickets for his apparently better (and actually faked) ones, and track him down through various boarding houses, with a bit more violence (the boys get captured by the scalper’s gang) and a rather nice scene involving a rescue by railway porters shouting, “Mind the doors!” (the boys are staying with Goggle’s Uncle Pancras, who works as a porter at the station where he was found as a baby).
Both of them are also rather difficult to find. There are seven books in the Jim Starling series, of which I read five when I was young. All borrowed from the library, and my battered copy of Jim Starling Goes to Town (the only one I own) I picked up from that library’s book sale – none of the others are still in the catalogue. A few were reprinted in paperback and are available relatively cheaply, but if I want the first (and my favourite – it had a huge impact on me as a child) in the series – Jim Starling – it’s going for $NZ170-$450 on bookfinder. The first in the Blue Door series is The Swish of the the Curtain, which has had multiple reprints and is easy enough to find, but Blue Door Venture – which I picked up, I think, from a sale at a second-hand furniture shop for about $5 (it’s priced in pencil at 7/6) – hasn’t been reprinted and is $180-odd for the few copies available.
I have a patchy working knowledge of prices and collectability and children’s fiction – I knew the Jim Starlings were hard to find, but I had no idea about Blue Door Venture until I checked when writing this. I do acquire series, but I’m not a collector – I want to read the book, first of all, and I get annoyed by how high prices make it very difficult for me or anyone else to do so (I very rarely spend over $NZ100 for any single book). I suspect Blue Door Venture’s never been reprinted because it’s not all that good, but that’s not all that helpful if you can’t find it to check. And libraries are getting rid of older stock, which is great for me personally if I get to pick it up cheaply, but in the broader sense of things limits the number of other readers.
