Whitman Mystery Stories - Winnie Winkle and the Diamond Heirlooms

Before picking up this book, I had never heard of "Winnie Winkle" before, but apparently Miss Winkle was the star of her own newspaper comic strip for a little over 75 years!  The strip was quite an achievement, and more than just for its longevity.  Created by Joseph Medill Patterson, the strip was written and drawn by Martin Branner (who provided the illustrations for this Whitman edition), and it wa one of the first strips to feature a working woman as its lead character.  In the strip, Winnie Winkle supported her parents and younger brother, and she eventually married and became pregnant (which, oddly enough, some newspapers felt was too risque for a comic strip, causing them to drop the daily dtrip from their papers!).  Branner wrote and drew the strip (with the aid of various assistants over the years) until 1962, when he suffered a stroke, and other creators took over the strip  until it was eventually discontinued in 1996.  Besides this book from Whitman, Winnie was also featured in a one-issue comic published by Dell, as well as ten feature films written by Branner and starring Ethelyn Gibson was the title character.  So, with this much fame out there, it is rather odd that I never heard of the character prior to finding this book...

 

Winnie Winkle and the Diamond Heirlooms is a fairly standard children's mystery of the period, but I have to say, it was rather engaging and well-written.  I'm not familiar with the author, Helen Berke, but I will definitely try and locate more of her books.  A quick search online reveals she wrote more than a couple of Whitman's "Big Little Books / Better Little Books," including Captain Midnight, Dick Tracey, Smilin' Jack, Terry and the Pirates, and Little Orphan Annie.  Winnie Winkle appears to be the only full-size novel that Ms. Berke wrote for Whitman, which is a shame, as this story was probably one of the better Whitman novels I've read to date!  Now, to be fair, part of that reason could be that I am unfamiliar with the character, having never read the comic strip, so I have no ability to compare the characters and characterization in this story with those in Branner's daily strip.  That being said, I went into this hoping for a good mystery, and I definitely got that!

 

The mystery begins when Winnie gets an urgent call from Mary Dee Adams, an old friend from high school, who begs Winnie to rush to Chicago to help her.  It seems Mary's Aunt Rhoda passed away, and the only thing left in her estate is an old house out in the country.  Aunt Rhoda had previously told her there was money and jewels that she was leaving her, but somehow they are gone!  So, Winnie, being the good friend that every girl sleuth is, gives up her long-awaited vacation plans and heads over to Chicago to help her friend. Winnie meets Tommy Blake, her artist boyfriend, and the three of them prepare to head out to Blainville - but not before they have dinner with Mr. Jenkins, a man claiming to be friends with Tommy (but Winnie suspects the friendship is one-sided!), and not before poor Winnie gets kidnapped by someone who mistakes her for Mary!  There is something definitely fishy going on, and Winnie decides she must get to the bottom of it.

 

Through unexpected circumstances, Winnie, Mary, and Tommy wind up as prisoners in the house Mary has inherited from her aunt, as an unscrupulous con man and his lackey (who turns out to be an even more dangerous criminal than his boss!) are determined to locate the fortune in jewels that Mary's aunt allegedly left her niece as a part of her estate.  The only problem is, no one knows where they are, and there appear to be no clues as to where to find them!  It becomes a race to see who will find them first - are they hidden in the grandfather clock that Aunt Rhoda had moved up to her room on the second floor?  Could they be stored in the one of the chandeliers hanging in various rooms?  Are they in one of the trunks in the attics, or in one of the storage chests out in the barn?  Every drawer is pulled out, every closet is combed from top to bottom, and every wall is checked for secret panels - but, alas!   No jewels are to be found.  Winnie and her friends eventually focus on getting word to someone outside of the house of their predicament, in the hopes someone will rescue them from the clutches of these villains.

 

The story does not necessarily build a lot of suspense, but there are definitely some tense moments (when one of the captors takes a shot at Tommy when he attempts to sneak out one night, or when the con man purposefully shows Winnie that he, too, has a gun and is not afraid to use it!).  The location of the jewels and the way in which Winnie is able to find them is actually pretty ingenuous, and I give the author credit for crafting a fun little mystery (and for giving Winnie more than half-a-brain when it comes to outwitting the villains!).  Now, there are a couple of "Nancy Drew" moments in the story - such as the secret compartment in the grandfather clock (Old Clock, anyone?), and the old diary that provides them with a few hints about the jewels (Clue in the Diary).  However, those similarities only enhance the story, as I saw them more as homages than I did any cheap rip-offs.

 

The artist on the Winnie Winkle comic strip, Martin Branner, provides all of the illustrations for this book, including the endpages, which features a scene taken directly from page 42 of the story, when Winnie, Mary, and Tommy are taken by a horse-drawn wagon from the train station to the home that once belonged to Aunt Rhoda.  Thankfully, the scene is from early in the story and does not spoil anything from the mystery, as a number of endpages from other Whitman mysteries have done!  

 

As always, there are a few tidbits from the story worth nothing.  The first is found when Winnie comes across a medicine cabinet full of a number of bottles of various kinds of pills, including sleeping pills.  She realizes they could be used to put their captors to sleep, giving them a means to escape; and when Tommy suggests giving them two pills each, Winnie quickly replies, "...we'd better give them just one.  We don't want to kill them, even if they deserve it" (p. 109).  I can't say I've ever read a children's mystery where the protagonist actually believes someone deserves to die!  However, that scene is quickly forgiven by the author's later references to books that Winnie finds in one of the trunks in the barn.  "She picked up a few at random and looked at the titles.  Horatio Alger ... Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth.  Rover Boys..." (pp. 139-40). Anyone even vaguely familiar with children's series book at the turn of the 20th century will recognize Alger and the Rover Boys!  As for Mrs. Southworth, she was a popular author of the late 19th century, writing about heroines who challenged the Victorian perceptions of that day (sort of how Winnie Winkle, as a working woman, challenged the idea of women's place in the working arena of the early 1900s).  It was surprising to see references to real authors and book series in a title such as this!

 

This was certainly one of the most enjoyable Whitman mysteries I have read, and most definitely one of the better written ones.  I will be searching for some of those Big / Better Little Books that Berke has written.

 

RATING:  9 specially-made chocolate cakes out of 10 for a well-written mystery that takes comic-strip characters and fleshes them out into very readable characters in a great story!