Kidnapped in the Jungle - A Hal Keen Mystery Story (No. 2)

While I do not normally collect boys' series books (with a few notable exceptions, such as Ted Wilford, Tom Swift, Ken Holt, and a few Hardy Boys here and there), the Hal Keen series is one where I have picked up books only when I have come across them in dust jackets at a very reasonable price.  Up until now, I've only had three of the ten book series - The Hermit of Gordon's Creek (book 1), The Copperhead Trail Mystery (book 3), and The Mysterious Arab (book 5).  Despite not having the whole series, I did go ahead and read those (well before I started this blog), and I found them to be halfway decent reads.  So, when I came across this book on Amazon with a dust jacket at a cheap price, I went ahead and snagged it.  Having now read it, I must admit - either my memory is faulty, and the other three books were not nearly as good as I remember, or this book just does not hold up as well as the others!

Kidnapped in the Jungle is the second book in the series.  The story finds Hal Keen traveling by ship to the Panama region to join his uncle, Denis Keen, who has been in that region searching for a missing young boy by the name of Alan Brody who disappeared in the jungles six month prior.  The elder Keen had no success, so Hal was going to meet up with his uncle to accompany him on his trip home.  Unexpectedly (to him, but not to us as the readers), Hal finds himself knee-deep in mysteries as his former school friend, Colin Walters, has stowed away on the boat!  He is believed to have killed one Mr. Wainwright in order to steal a treasure map that would lead him to a hidden family treasure -- where else?  You guessed it!  In the jungles near Panama!  Coly. as he is known, claims to have followed one of the men he knows who actually stole the map onto the boat, and now he asks for Hal's help.  Of course, Hal readily agrees, not knowing that mystery will also intertwine with the search for young Alan Brody.

 

While the story makes some attempt at being suspenseful - stinging scorpions just inches away, deadly tarantulas crawling up Hal's arm, and stories that two of the three criminal died horribly in the treacherous swamps in the jungle - the sluggish manner in which it proceeds only makes the story seem to drag.  It's fairly evident from the get-go that Hal and Mr. Brody's guide through the jungle has evil intentions, and when he turns out to be working alongside the only surviving criminal who is searching for the Wainwright treasure, it comes as no surprise.  Even the revelation regarding Mr. Brody's son towards the end of the story does not truly surprise the reader, as it is hinted at several times as they traipse through the jungle.  There's very little time actually spent "searching" for the treasure (they know where it is based on the map, and it takes them less than a chapter to dig it up, never even opening it after they find the box), and there's actually no time spent "looking" for Mr. Brody's son.  The majority of the story is spent with the walk through the jungle and the turn of events when their guide shows his true colors, leaving Hal tied to a tree (as depicted on the cover) and taking Mr. Brody with him to do God-only-knows-what.  (And Hal is tied to the tree for more than 24 hours, leaving me to wonder - what did he do when he needed to go to the bathroom?) 

 

There are a couple of things that caught my attention while reading.  On page 2, when Hal is talking with the purser aboard the ship, the purser describes Hal's uncle as "a miniature Woolworth Building..."  You don't often see references to actual departments stores in children's series books; normally, the author will use fictional store names.  Another thing worth mentioning is found on page 115, when Hal is speaking with Mr. Brody about their diminutive native guide - Hal laughs at the small stature of the guide, telling Mr. Brody that "[w]hat puzzles me is whether he's the only nigger in the woodpile?"  Now, remembering this book was published in 1931, such a turn of phrase would not have been as shocking as it would be to today's readers.  The phrase originally referred to some unknown factor that would ultimately cause things to turn out differently than one had anticipated - basically, something suspicious or not quite right.  As the term "nigger" became more of an ethnic slur, the phrase was used less and less.  Of course, the story also has other ethnic slurs, as they consistently refer to their guide as a "half-breed," and more than once, references are made to the superiority of "white man" over the jungle natives.  Again, when reading these things, one must remember the context and time period when the story was written in order to understand that such ways of thinking, while appalling today, would have been fairly standard in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

One final thing I found odd is the fact that Hal smokes a pipe in this book.  I don't recall any of the other three books I've read having Hal smoke at all, yet in this story, Hal is said to have "leaned over toward the night table [in his state room aboard the ship], and secured his pipe and tobacco.  After he had taken a puff or two..." (p. 11).  Later in the story, while in the jungle with Mr. Brody, he pulls out his pipe again and smokes.  While Hal's age is never stated in this book, I seem to recall from reading the other books that Hal was a teenager.  If such is the case, why in the world would he be smoking a pipe?!

The series is written by Percy Keese Fitzhugh under the pseudonym Hugh Lloyd.  Fitzhugh wrote nearly one hundred books for children, including several boy scout-type series featuring Tom Slade, Pee-Wee Harris, Roy Blakeley, and others.  Apparently, from what I could gather online, when Fitzhugh's series about scouts began to falter, he wrote the Hal Keen series for Grosset & Dunlap, as well as the lesser known Skippy Dare series (which only had three titles).  Neither series lasted as long as his scouting series did.  In fact, one of his characters, Pee-Wee Harris, still appears in a comic strip in the Boys' Life magazine.

A far as I know, only this book and the first were republished by Whitman under different cover art.  Whitman was known for offering up previously published books from series without actually publishing all the books in that particular series (such as Tom Swift, the Rover Boys, Garry Grayson, the Outdoor Girls, and others).  The cover art, as seen here, is usually of a lesser quality than that of the original stories, and usually not as detailed either.  Bert Salg provided the art for the original Grosset & Dunlap version of this book, and his visuals are, as far as I'm concerned, a far cry better than the unsigned art that graced the cover of the Whitman edition.

 

The internal illustrations are done by the same artist who did the cover art (Berg Salg), yet they do not have the same quality as that on the cover.  In addition, the publisher did not insert the illustrations at the correct places for the scenes depicted.  For example, the first internal is inserted between pages 66 and 67; however, the scene shown in the illustration does not appear until page 108! The second internal is inserted between pages 130 and 131, yet the scene occurs on page 142.  The final internal is the closest, as it appears between pages 194 and 195, while the scene actually takes place on 193.  It would be interesting to know the reason for the misplaced illustrations.

Although this book did not meet my expectations, based on the previous three I read, I will likely still pick up the series as I find the books and hope that they hold up better than this one!

RATING:  5 ragged shirts with duck trousers out of 10 for at least attempting to take the main character and put him in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar locale and situation.