Penny Parker Mystery Stories No. 2 - The Vanishing Houseboat

The second Penny Parker mystery was published the same year as the first, 1939.  This was the same year that Grosset & Dunlap published the sixteenth Nancy Drew mystery, The Clue of the Tapping Heels.  But that's not all!  Author Mildred Wirt was quite the prolific little writer, as she had a total of eleven children's mysteries published that year, including two Kay Tracey books, one Dana Girls, one Honey Bunch, one Dot and Dash, the last Penny Nichols book, the only Connie Carl book, and two of her own mystery stories for girls!  You've got to give the woman credit for being able to churn out basically one book a month!  It was interesting to note the number of similarities in the stories of the first Penny Parker book with Tapping Heels, and so as I picked up the second book in the series, my mind automatically started looking for further similarities in this mystery - and Millie did not disappoint!

The Vanishing Houseboat is the second Penny Parker Mystery Story and features a rather interesting plot involving a boarding house in a nearby town where people are disappearing in a particular room!  Penny becomes involved with the mystery when she helps a friend, Laura Blair, get a job at the boarding house.  She and Louise are immediately turned off by the husband and wife who run the boarding house, but Laura is determined to stay, as she needs the work.  At the same time, Penny befriends a homeless man known as Mud-Cat Joe and his family, who are living in an abandoned barn because their houseboat was stolen.  Penny agrees to help the man find his houseboat so he and his family can have their home back. As Penny digs deeper into the mystery at the boarding house, she soon discovers that the restaurant owner on the one side knows something is going on but will not reveal what it is, and the owner of the dry cleaner on the other side seems to be involved, but Penny can't figure out how.  The mystery is rather complicated, and Penny and Louise find themselves in some very deadly danger before the case is solved!  And, of course, as with any children's mystery it seems, the two seemingly unrelated mysteries (the vanishing houseboat and the disappearing guests at the boarding house) are connected!

 

One of the first things I noticed about this book, once I was finished, is that like in Tapping Heels, the title of the mystery has actually little to do with the main mystery.  In Tapping Heels, the actual tapping has very little, if anything, to do with the mystery, other than Nancy tapping out an S.O.S. to get help when she is being held captive.  In Vanishing Houseboat, the actual houseboat that has vanished plays such a small part of the main mystery involving the boarding house and the people disappearing from the room therein.   And along those lines, it is interesting that Nancy uses her feet to tap out a message for help, Penny also uses her feet to pound on the wall in an effort to obtain help to save her and Louise from the burning building (p. 189).  Other similarities include Penny and Louise nearly being overcome by smoke in a burning building (p. 189), just as Nancy and George were overcome by the strong incense in Tapping Heels. And just as Nancy Drew's father hired a private detective (Stephan Keely) in Tapping Heels, in this book, Penny Parker's father hires a private detective (Gregory Kane, p. 121).  And one certainly can't miss the racial references utilized in the two books - in Tapping Heels, the slurs were against African American individuals, in Vanishing Houseboat, the slurs were targeted at the Chinese laundromat owner next to the boarding house.  But, again, this was the time in which the stories were written, and obviously, we have come a long way since then.

 

A fellow reader pointed out to me that there was another similarity in this book to the Nancy Drew series - when Penny hurriedly drives her car into the barn in order to avoid the storm (p. 11), it is very reminiscent of Nancy Drew hurriedly driving into a barn in The Secret of the Old Clock (p. 30).

Perhaps taking a page from the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, Wirt does make reference several times in this book to the first Penny Parker tale, making mention of the "witch doll" and even talking about Osandra, the alleged medium from the first book.  Also, similar to the first book where Penny helps out an old school friend, Neillie Marble, in this book, she helps out another old school friend, Laura Blair.  Interesting that these friends are both already finished with school, while Penny and Louise are still students.

An interesting observation I made while reading The Vanishing Houseboat is that Penny Parker lives in Riverview (a derivative of River Heights, perhaps?), and the nearby town where the boarding house is located is White Falls (similar to Oak Falls from the Dana Girls?).  Certainly makes one wonder if Wirt had Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls on her mind when writing these stories, with such similar names for the towns.

Probably one of the most interesting things I found in this book was Mud-Cat Joe and his family.  I was not aware that in the 1930s people actually lived on houseboats, particularly when they had a family like Joe did.  But a bit of research online revealed that there is actually a long-forgotten history of families in America who lived in homemade shanty boats, which was "a reasonable and cost-free solution for displaced people in rural areas and workers in urban areas."  American River People It seems in the 1930s, a number of jobless and displaced people took to the water to live and look for work, just like Mud-Cat Joe in this book.  Thus, it stands to reason that Wirt was either familiar with, or had read about, some of these river people and decided to integrate them into her book.

Something I found quite surprising in this book are the rather cruel insults Wirt has Penny throw out without a second thought.  While talking with her housekeeper, Penny remarks that she does not want to put any weight, as "Fat girls simply get nowhere these days" (p. 73).  On that same page, when the housekeeper tells Penny that an Albert Layman telephone, asking if she would play tennis with him, Penny rather curtly responds, "He'll have to find some other girl ... All has pimples" (p. 73).

"Can he help that?" Mrs. Weems inquired mildly."

"Yes, he could wash his neck now and then.  Al is a very light-headed youth, too," Penny added airily.  "I like young men with purpose"  (p. 74)

Just like Witch Doll, The Vanishing Houseboat was re-published in 1958 with some minor revisions to the text (amounts of money, etc.) and with entirely new cover art.  In my opinion, the revised cover art is much more childish and less mysterious than the 1939 cover art.  There's something about that original design and black-and-white drawings of those original covers that creates an ominous mood for the book, which the revised, more colorful covers fail to capture.  Plus, Penny and Louise appear way too young in the revised covers, almost as if they were not even in high school yet!

I can honestly say that I am really enjoying this series thus far, and I'm only two books in.  Others have told me that the series gets better as it progresses, so since I've enjoyed the first two, I can only imagine how much more I'm going to enjoy those I have yet to read!

RATING:  10 creepy old paintings with moving eyes out of 10 for crafting an intriguing mystery that keeps Penny (and readers!) guessing how it was done!