The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen
As a kid, I spent many happy hours lying on my belly, with my tennis-shoe heels bumping together in the air, reading the Hardy Boys books – not to mention Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators and Encyclopedia Brown and any other series about kid detectives which I could get my twiggy little hands on.
I loved reading these books on vacation … and I can’t help but notice that some of their holiday mood comes from the fact that Frank and Joe Hardy and Nancy Drew and Jupiter Jones and the rest of the pint-sized Sherlocks are often on the road to vacationland themselves in the books, investigating crimes not just in their home town, but in Pennsylvania Dutch country, down the gullet of the Grand Canyon, or up at a remote mountain lodge.
As in the first Pals in Peril novel, Whales on Stilts!, I wanted to capture the happiness of summer days spent reading those books – and my odd nostalgia, as a child, for an America I was just starting to understand and imagine ... my sense of a lineage of American child readers that I could trace on library cards, scrawled names from different decades – leading from some kid Gus back in 1943 down, through years of saddle shoes and flat-tops and fin-cars and the flip and hippies to my name, written last on that list in the 1980s.
So this book is my homage to those old mystery series read by all those people through the years.
And now you are part of that lineage of readers. We all, the living and the dead, welcome you.