Ginny Gordon and the Disappearing Candlesticks

by Margaret Jervis (Illustrator), Julie Campbell

The Hustlers start a swap shop as a money-making project, Then Ginny's Great-Aunt Betsy's heirloom silver candlesticks go missing.

248 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1948

Reviews

[Anna Katharine · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Ginny Gordon series was a short-lived effort of Whitman Publishing, which is more famous for the Trixie Belden books by the same author (Julie Campbell.) Meant perhaps as competition for Stratemeyer's Nancy Drew series, Ginny Gordon and her gang of teens (called the 'Hustlers,' which did not age well) were eventually deemed to 'advanced' for their child audience and were discontinued. This is the first of the series, which finds Ginny and her crew starting a Swap Shop to repair and repurpose cast-off items and/or antiques in an unused storefront on their town's main street. As in Nancy Drew, the teens are almost immediately beset with suspicious characters, scoffing adults, and grudges that originate before their birth. Unlike the rather noble Nancy, however, Ginny reads as bossy and mercurial, engaging in petty grudges and frequent self-pity. The mystery is about as complex as one would expect, with unlikely scenarios, hidden doors, and a fairly bland solution. The novel also showcases the expected prejudices of the time. Following a series of petty thefts, suspicion falling immediately on either an itinerant organ or the philosophy-professor-turned-mad-hermit...or the potential of an upstanding citizen harboring the mental illness of kleptomania, whom the kids frequently refer to as 'the klep.' Casual misogyny is rife, and a man who lisps and cooks for himself in his rooming house instead of eating meals at a local restaurant is derided as a sissy. The only interesting thing I gleaned from reading this was an usual usage of the term 'lunch' for the local cop's 9PM meal: "They were on their way to get their usual evening lunch of doughnuts and coffee." The line illustrations by Margaret Jervis are charming, but I can't recommend this book otherwise.