Mr. Mysterious & Company by Sid Fleischman

My relationship to this children’s novel and how I came to re-read it now are two interesting stories.

Most summers, for maybe a decade now, Jim and I have made a trip to Cedar City, Utah for their Shakespeare Festival. We went this year, a few weeks ago, and saw Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and an excellent production of She Loves Me, a musical adapted by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick from the 1937 play Parfumerie that was also the basis for the movies Little Shop Around the Corner and You’ve Got Mail.

Cedar City is a charming small town in the southwest corner of Utah above Zion. We have a regular routine of breakfast at a diner along the block of shops in the historic center and a walk up to the bookstore called Main Street Books. Jim strode to the cookbooks. I investigated the rare and collectible section and was pleased to run across a copy of Mr. Mysterious & Company a novel for children I had read as a kid. I bought it for $20 and also bought a hardback edition of The Great Gatsby for $3, which I’ve been meaning to re-read for some time now; maybe now’s the time.

I had to explain to Jim why I wanted to buy a children’s novel and then I told the story again to the clerk at the sales counter.

As a young reader, checking out books from the Fairview Branch Library in Santa Monica, I had come across the novels of Sid Fleischman. I think Mr. Mysterious & Company was the first I read, but eventually I read several more. Someone told me, I believe it was my third grade teacher, that Sid Fleischman lived in Santa Monica. She suggested that I write to him. The idea that authors were regular people that you could write to you would never have occurred to me. But my teacher had an address, so I wrote to tell him how much I loved his books and, again at my teacher’s suggestion, invited him to visit my school. To my amazement he wrote back and agreed. We set a date. On the day he arrived, I was summoned to the front of the school to meet him. I remember a nice looking man, older than my father, friendly. I escorted him to the assembly room, pride that I had made this happen lifting my chest and my feet a little off the ground.

That day had always stayed with me, and when I saw a copy of the book that began the episode, I had to have it.

So, I re-read it, and I’m happy to say it was just as much fun as I remembered. I can see why I liked it as a kid. I saw even more to admire in it now.

The story is of a family in 1884, traveling by covered wagon across the southwest to San Diego. We meet them in Texas but they’ve already been traveling through several states. The father is a magician who with his wife and their three children put on shows at every frontier town. The mother plays the piano and sews the costumes. She also schools the children in the back of the wagon while the father drives the matched white horses “Hocus” and “Pocus”. In the act, Jane, almost twelve, is the sleeping princess that floats above a couch. Paul, age nine, about the same age as I was when I read the book, plays the part of the disembodied head, the “Sphinx” that answers three questions from the audience. Youngest daughter, Anne, appears as the doll that comes to life after it’s placed inside the magic dollhouse.

Jane longs to be grown-up, have real friends and go to parties. Paul isn’t sure he wants to trade the adventurous life of a traveling show for the settled life in San Diego where his father intends to buy a ranch and raise cattle and send the children to a real school. Anne dreams of being a ballerina like the photo of one included in the magic lantern slides that closes their show.

The family acquires a dog along the way; they name him Professor and teach him to jump rope. They run afoul of an ornery man named Jeb Grimes. Later they come across an outlaw named the Badlands Kid, who they help in capturing. Using the magic lantern, they scare off a bunch of indians intent on stealing a filly that the family agreed to deliver from one town to another as a present from a beau to his fiancee. Father rids a town of ruffians by playing a trick on them that makes them think there’s an undiscovered city of gold down in Mexico that’s theirs for the taking. One of the wagon wheels breaks and must be repaired. The cow they keep tied to the back of the wagon slows them down. The goal is to get to San Diego in time for Christmas. They arrive just in time, do a final show for the neighbors, father files for a homestead, and then a local theater-owner asks the family to do their show for him, one night a month.

It’s charming and dear. The family is kind to each other. There’s a fun bit of business where each of the children is allowed one day a year to announce a holiday called “Abracadabra Day” where they can misbehave and not be punished. They misbehave in benign ways. The villains aren’t too scary. And there’s magic. No wonder I loved it.

The writing is good. Every chapter begins with a lovely bit of stage setting. Here’s the first sentence of Chapter 6, “The sun came up hot and clear, as if it had been cut out of a prairie fire with a pair of scissors.” I noticed that almost every time Fleischman introduces a new idea there’s an immediate pay-off. Barely have we heard of Abracadabra Day, for instance, than Paul is taking advantage of it. Problems are quickly solved, but new adventures keep coming. It’s all wrapped up nicely.

Reconnecting to this book, and my personal story of meeting the author, I wondered whatever happened to Sid Fleischman. I looked him up on the library website. He wrote a ton of books, for adults as well as children, and a couple of books on magic. And he wrote an autobiography late in life, which the library also had a copy of so I put it on reserve and read that next.

I write a diary entry like this after every book I read, mostly novels, mostly the best of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.  To see what else is on my reading list click here.