The Ship Without a Crew

Tod Moran series #4

by Howard Pease

A mystery set in the South Pacific. The fourth Entry in the Tod Moran Mysteries.

Genres: Mystery, Young Adult, Adventure

304 pages

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

Howard Pease was an American writer of adventure stories from Stockton, California. Most of his stories revolved around a young protagonist, Joseph Todhunter ("Tod") Moran, who shipped out on tramp freighters during the interwar years.
Pease received two literary awards during his lifetime. In 1944, he received the California Commonwealth Book Award for his novel Thunderbolt House (reprinted by Scholastic as Mystery at Thunderbolt House, published that year, and in 1946 he was awarded the Children's Book Award from the Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education "for a book that deals realistically with problems in the child's world" for his novel Heart of Danger.

Reviews

[C_Kayaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't quite know what to expect with this book, but it held my interest and I would recommend to middle school/jr. high readers.

[Michael McCue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Howard Pease wrote what we now call young adult fiction or YA. Pease's books with the character Todd Moran were published between 1926 and 1961. The Ship Without a Crew was published in 1934. Todd started out as a cabin boy in the first book The Tattooed Man and was Third Mate of the freighter Araby in this book. The Araby while steaming toward Tahiti finds a schooner with no one on board. A mystery ensues. Will Todd and Captain Jarvis solve the mystery of the abandoned schooner?
In some ways Pease's works are dated, there are few woman characters and those are not central to the story. Some racist language is found in these books, common to the times. However a careful reading of these books shows that the true villains are the American and European whites and the native peoples are almost always the ones with integrity and good intensions.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another book that I read as a child, and have used the wonders of the Internet to find again (and reread). It's a mystery with unusual detectives and an unusual setting - the detectives are officers on a tramp steamer, and the mystery involves an abandoned vessel (replicating the situation of the Mary Celeste), apparent insurance fraud, and the disappearance or murder of the previous investigators assigned to the fraud case. Tod Moran, the third officer of the "Araby" is the viewpoint character; his mentor is the ship's captain; apparently this is the last in a series of novels about the pair investigating mysteries around the world - I might look up some of the others...