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My Back Pages #01: The Usborne Detective’s Handbook

My Back Pages is what I would call an irregular feature that I’ve got going here. Essentially, every now and then, I dig out a book from my old shelves and my childhood to examine it with a new perspective and more than a hint of nostalgia. I have no idea why I’m doing this, and what I’ll end up with, but I figured that it might be slightly interesting. More interesting than what usually happens here anyway. Yes, it takes its name from the Dylan song, and yes, this is a standard introduction. You can read more about it from the introductory page I’ve written for it.

A Block Of Information

Title: The Usborne Detective’s Handbook
Authors: Anne Civardi, Judy Hindley, Angela Wilkes
Illustrator: Colin King
Other folks: Donald Rumbelow (Consultant), Heather Amery (Series Editor)
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd
First publication: 1979
Edition: 1989, 9780860202783

Just Like Dick Tracy

So here we go, with our first book and the truth is I almost couldn’t start with any other book because this was a book I just went back to time and time again. I suppose you could very well think of it as one of the favourites, in that case.

It’s exactly what it says it is, Usborne’s guide to becoming a detective. All the little tips and tricks that you have to know to foil those nefarious criminals. There’s a rather large variety of things in here. Apart from a number of case studies, there’s spot-the-difference, general knowledge, sneaking around, how to judge distance, a lot about forgeries and phoneys, identifying people in disguises, exposing fake evidence or alibis, walking in the dark, making maps, scouting, what villains do, how people react to interrogations, identifying handwriting, and so on. It’s kind of like an activity book, I think, and that’s how I approached it. Every other day, I’d take it out and open it to a random page to see what I’d do on that day.

And I think it worked for me in part due to the same reason detective fiction tends to work with kids in general. Nevertheless, there was just something more about this, something special. Unlike your Famous Fives and Fantastic Fours (wait, I really don’t remember the group with four intrepid kids… Fabulous, maybe?), you weren’t trying to get in on other people’s adventures. You were on your way to your own. You were going to become a detective.

Now that I look at it, I think it’s ingenious, primarily because… a detective. It’s just one of those things that you imagine yourself to be when you’re a kid. Like in that picture just above, with the stake-outs and all that stuff. It’s exciting stuff for a child. And add that to the fact that whenever I read this, I was always quite convinced that it was entirely legit, that detectives all around the world had started out reading this. (Okay, so I was easily deceived.) So it was brilliant simply because it just fit into that imaginative pocket so well and really met my childhood expectations of what it’d be like to be a detective, and it did well enough to convince me that I was onto something.

There was always that careful balance between the real and the fantastically simple. I mean, if you looked at this page now, about detecting forged paintings, you wouldn’t seriously think that you could successfully learn it from a book like this, but back when I was still young, it just seemed perfectly realistic.

I absolutely adored this book. I always did wonder if Mr. Rumbelow was a real detective, though.

A Little Bit Of History

I actually inscribed the date on the front page of the book, a habit I’ve long since lost. Then again, someone probably inscribed it for me since handwriting is not exactly a strong suit of mine. I also used to have this lovely stamp for my name, as you can see there, and I would get so terribly amused with it that I’d put it on everything that wasn’t of immediate significance.

My mom tells me that it was my aunt who bought this book for me after she had brought me to the optometrist’s where I had my first pair of spectacles done (an ill-fated pair that didn’t last long, really). Apparently, I had been (surprisingly?) well-behaved, and so it was a reward of some sort. Thank you, Aunt!

Dodd And Trapper

These guys are the two detectives in the book. Dodd is the guy without the moustache. Trapper is the other one.

Detective Trapper was the older (from the moustache of course), more serious (from the moustache too) bloke, typically in blue, looking all so serious and proper. He barely broke a smile in the book, as I remember, and when he did, it was a smug one for having thwarted a villain of some sort. I couldn’t quite identify with him. He was just so composed and cool and apparently experienced that he seemed to be, I suppose you could say, at a distance. He was some high-ranking Jedi and I wasn’t even a Padawan, for Pete’s sake.

So I always thought of him as the big gun, the one that you’d call when the business was serious. He didn’t have time for our petty thefts. He wasn’t the one to get his hands dirty. He didn’t dash about, swashbuckling and suave. No, no, no, he was the big shot, and we were best off watching in the distance in awe of his deductive prowess and ingenious planning.

The one I found myself more able to identify with was Detective Dodd. And by identify with, I really mean aspire to, because (let’s be frank) these two detectives were really non-characters (it wasn’t a storybook) so I had nothing to identify with, and I wanted to be a detective so the goal that seemed within reach was to step into the shoes of Detective Dodd.

He was a different character altogether, a hands-on man (a fact I deduced from purely from the tone of his cases), a lower-ranked detective (he was younger so it seemed to make sense) who was all-action (I couldn’t have known but that seemed fitting). To me at that time, he also had a goofy sort of face and a goofy sort of name, a friendlier prospect than Detective Trapper, to say the least.

There was also a dog named Petal and her trainer but this pair only appeared at the beginning of the book. The trainer appeared near the end of the book demonstrating an armhold. I guess Dodd and Trapper were just too awesome.

A Couple More Memorable Things

Here’s one of my favourite pages. It’s not the most colourful or the most frightening, and it certainly doesn’t have those lovely action sequences in the other case studies, but I loved this page because it’s the only one that has a realistic-looking criminal. It’s like the sort of thing you see in Crime Watch, and you start thinking, if I was a real detective, I’d nab you for sure.

Then the opposing page had some silly game where you identified him out of nine ‘photographs’ and it really just spoiled everything.

I was always a little freaked out by this fake mermaid illustration. There was just something about the smile that really got to me. Because there were so many pages without such freaky things, and since I would dive into random pages every time, I had a very low chance of flipping to it, but a low chance is still some chance and so I saw it every now and then. On those occasions, I would just quickly turn the page away, as if her smile would turn me into… well, her.

A while later, I got used to it and could even stare at it. It was then that I began to wonder why she was always picking her nose.

Quotes

Page 130: “A good detective is very crafty. He always outwits crooks.” (I certainly hope so.)

Page 34: “A hat, dark glasses or a false moustache are all very useful disguises.”

Page 181: “Look closely at lumpy bandages and slings. They may be hiding something.” (And for some time after I read this, I thought that people with bandages and slings were all secret agents.)

Page 183: “If your suspect struggles to get away, do not hit him. Try to knock things out of his pockets. He will be confused and stop to pick them up.”

Brilliant stuff.

Last Words

You can still get the book. I discovered that it’s still being published by Usborne, and hey, that’s not bad for a book that’s all of 30 years old. So if for some reason you want to buy it, try looking around here. It has a fancy new cover and all, but I believe the inside is still mostly the same, though I suppose the section on faked photographs will have to be updated to include Photoshopping. It is a tad expensive, but my experience with children’s books has always been on the pricey side anyway.

Pretty amazing, now that I think of it, that fifteen years on, you can still get this book somewhere, some place. And somewhere, some place, another child is having the same little adventures, arranging stake-outs, arresting crooks and thieves, detecting forgeries and waiting for that realistic-looking criminal to one day appear in their lives. Somewhere, some place, Dodd and Trapper are still dashing about, sneaking around, and saving the world.

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© 2009 a modest odyssey.