A Mystery for Thoreau - Hardcover

Platt, Kin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374353379 ISBN 13: 9780374353377

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2008

Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Oliver Puckle, news gatherer for the Concord Freeman in the summer of 1846, has his work cut out for him when word arrives of a gruesome murder at Walden Pond. It seems the only citizen who is not a suspect is the poetphilosopher Henry David Thoreau, who spent the night locked in the local jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. As Oliver leads the charge to unravel the mystery, he has much to learn from his colorful neighbors – among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and a feisty teenage Louisa May Alcott – but unexpectedly it is the recluse Thoreau himself who provides particular help to the investigation.

This posthumously published novel, set in the famously literary town of Concord, Massachusetts, is rich with intrigue and witty detail and features a foreword by the author’s son.

About this title

About the Author

KIN PLATT (1911–2003) had a varied and illustrious career, writing for radio, comics, and television, and publishing over thirty books, including two adventures in the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, and the Edgar Award– winning young adult novel Sinbad and Me.

Reviews

Grade 8 Up—Set in Concord, MA, in 1886, this mystery centers around Oliver Puckle, a 16-year-old reporter who gathers news for his uncle's paper. When the body of an elderly community member is discovered near Henry David Thoureau's cottage at Walden Pond, Oliver is determined to solve the crime. He soon surmises that the murder is related to the recent arrival of an attractive young woman, who has since gone missing. Although Thoreau, an acquaintance of the narrator's, uses his knowledge of the woods to help interpret clues, he is more a decorative overlay than an integral character in the whodunit. The same can be said of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, who both make cameo appearances at the newspaper office. A foreword by the author's son recounts Platt's career and explains how this book was found among his papers and published posthumously. Taken as a whole, the novel seems sketchily researched and hastily thrown together-more a work in progress than a completed manuscript.—Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Written in a discursive nineteenth-century style and populated with familiar (to the well-read, at least) historical figures, this posthumously published murder mystery showcases Platt’s ability to mix melodrama with tongue-in-cheek humor. When a mysterious, beautiful young visitor goes missing and a local madwoman is found dead on the doorstep of Henry Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, teenage journalist Oliver Puckle launches a frantic investigation. The crime and its solution are, however, only rudimentary insertions into a tale that is really about 1846 Concord, its environs, and its prominent citizens. Along the way Oliver encounters the godlike Ralph Waldo Emerson, advises 14-year-old tomboy Louisa May Alcott to try writing prose instead of poetry, has frank discussions about racial inequalities (in one case the n-word is used, though in the context of historical dialect) and repeatedly interviews the otherworldly Thoreau—who speaks only in direct quotes taken from his journals and other writings. If not quite another Ghost of Hellsfire Street (but then, what is?), this still sheds amusing sidelight on some major people and places in our country’s literary landscape. Grades 5-8. --John Peters

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374353379
• ISBN 13: 9780374353377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176