The Power Boys are a series of six juvenile mystery novels that were published from 1964 to 1967 by Whitman Publishing. [1] The books were written by Mel Lyle, a pseudonym, [2] and illustrated by Raymond Burns. [3]
The books were aimed at the pre-teen market. [4]
Jack Power (age 17), Chip Power (age 15), and their Dalmatian dog, Blaze, live with the boys' photojournalist father Thomas Power. Since the death of their mother Jack and Chip travel with Mr. Power during school vacation [5] and come upon mysteries, which they investigate.
Jack Power is described as being tall and slender, with reddish-brown hair cut short, and he has green eyes and freckles. He is portrayed as more serious and dependable than his younger brother. [6]
Chip Power is slim, almost as tall as Jack, has blond hair with reddish glints, and his eyes are blue. He is more impulsive, and sometimes his eyes or face are described as mischievous. [6]
Thomas Power is about as tall as Jack, but looks shorter because he is of heavier build. His hair is black and streaked with premature grey. The boys and their father are portrayed as very close to each other. [6]
Detective James Wilson, of the New York Police Department, is a tall man with white hair and gray eyes. He is Mr. Power’s oldest and dearest friend. [7]
Dick Donovan looks very similar to Jack – tall and lean, with red hair and freckles. [5] He is the son of wealth Barry Donovan, and appears in the last two novels.
Blaze is a Dalmatian dog that Mr. Power bought from a Los Angeles fireman. The Dalmatian joined the family at the end of the first book, after Mr. Power returned from covering a brush fire that threatened Griffith Park. His name was chosen because of his firefighter connection. [6]
The six books in the series are as follows: [8] [9]
In The Mystery of the Double Kidnapping Jack tells his new friend, Dick Donovan, that he lives in Chicago, [5] but none of the books take place there, since the Power boys travel with their father during vacations. Three of the books are set in New York City (books 1, 5, and 6), but it is not until the third of these New York books, which is the last in the series, that the family makes the city their new home, since Barry Donovan, a wealthy man who appeared in book five, could supply Thomas Power with a lot of future work. The first paragraph of this last book tells how much the brothers love their new eight-room apartment. We also learn that Mrs. Donovan helped with the decorating. [7]
Book 2, The Mystery of the Flying Skeleton, takes place in the Florida Keys before and during a hurricane; [10] book 3, The Mystery of the Burning Ocean, takes place in Bermuda; [11] and book 4, The Mystery of the Million-Dollar Penny, takes place in the Ozarks. [12]
The books were published with illustrated hard covers, but no dust jackets. [3] Raymond Burns's line illustrations were done in a single color, which varies from book to book.
It is likely that the series was written by two authors. William Larson, an editor hired by Whitman in 1964, stated that if more than one book in a series was published in a year, they were almost always written by different people. [13] A 1964 article stated that sometimes two authors write under the same pseudonym, "such as Julie Campbell or Mel Lyle," but Whitman restricted the writers under one byline "because juvenile readers detect differences in style and send letters of complaint." [2]
William Manners (the pen name of William Rosenberg) [14] wrote a series of mystery novels for Whitman Publishing, [15] but there are no published sources stating who wrote the Power Boys series.
The Power Boys mysteries are of interest to many who collect classic children’s series books. In 1986 The Armchair Detective reported that the Summer 1986 issue of Mystery & Adventure Series Review published an article suggesting that the Power Boys author (or authors) may have borrowed ideas from other Whitman Publishing series. [16] The October 2010 issue of Yellowback Library has a review of The Mystery of the Flying Skeleton, [17] and the May 2011 issue of Susabella Passengers and Friends contains a review of the entire series, and asks subscribers if they know who wrote the books, using the pseudonym of Mel Lyle. [18]
During the 1950s a series of short paperback Power Boys novels were published by Triple Nickel Books. These novels were written by Arthur Benwood, and told of the adventures of Ted and Steve Power. The books sold for fifteen cents each (three nickels). [19]
Nancy Drew is a fictional character appearing in several mystery book series, movies, video games, and a TV show as a teenage amateur sleuth. The books are ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Created by the publisher Edward Stratemeyer as the female counterpart to his Hardy Boys series, the character first appeared in 1930 in the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories series, which lasted until 2003 and consisted of 175 novels.
The dime novel is a form of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S. popular fiction issued in series of inexpensive paperbound editions. The term dime novel has been used as a catchall term for several different but related forms, referring to story papers, five- and ten-cent weeklies, "thick book" reprints, and sometimes early pulp magazines. The term was used as a title as late as 1940, in the short-lived pulp magazine Western Dime Novels. In the modern age, the term dime novel has been used to refer to quickly written, lurid potboilers, usually as a pejorative to describe a sensationalized but superficial literary work.
Franklin W. Dixon is the pen name used by a variety of different authors who were part of a team that wrote The Hardy Boys novels for the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Dixon was also the writer attributed for the Ted Scott Flying Stories series, published by Grosset & Dunlap.
Walter Brown Gibson was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote "more than 300 novel-length" Shadow stories, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. He authored several novels in the Biff Brewster juvenile series of the 1960s. He was married to Litzka R. Gibson, also a writer, and the couple lived in New York state.
The Three Investigators is an American juvenile detective book series first published as "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators". It was created by Robert Arthur Jr., who believed involving a famous person such as movie director Alfred Hitchcock would attract attention. Random House is the U.S. publisher and still has some of the rights to the books. Other rights are possessed by the heirs of Robert Arthur, Jr. and the German publisher Kosmos. The characters known as the "Three Investigators" are three boys named Jupiter Jones, Peter Crenshaw and Bob Andrews. As the series has become very popular in Germany, several stories have been produced directly for the German market.
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Nancy Drew: Girl Detective is a 2004–2012 book series which replaced the long-running Nancy Drew mystery series. This new series is written in first person narration, from Nancy's point of view, and features updated versions of the main Nancy Drew characters. New secondary characters are introduced to populate River Heights and appear over multiple books, adding a framework to Nancy's world.
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Girl detective is a genre of detective fiction featuring a young, often teen-aged, female protagonist who solves crimes as a hobby.
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