CYOA: #11 The Mystery of the Maya by R. A. Montgomery

I read this over a week ago, but I’ve been busy and haven’t written up my review like I normally would have already done. I had said earlier that I thought R. A. Montgomery was the writer that was more likely to throw gratuitously “cool” stuff into his books just because it was cool, and Edward Packard was the one who was more likely to either show off some research he’d done, or try and teach an educational or philosophical or social or political theme in his work. I’ve come around with this re-read as an adult and flip-flopped that assessment, at least so far. Granted;  I’m still  pretty early in the series, all things considered. Mystery of the Maya is number eleven in a series that lasted for over a hundred volumes (not that I’m going to review more than about twenty five or so of them). If you recall, I’m coming off, recently, five Packard books in a row; The Mystery of Chimney Rock, Your Code Name is Jonah, The Third Planet from Altair,  Deadwood City, and Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? not to mention, of course, the original book in the series, The Cave of Time. I’ve also already read four total books by Montgomery now; Journey Under the Sea, Space and Beyond, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti and now Mystery of the Maya.

To be fair, maybe my impression was made by the later books in the teens and twenties, where I do think Montgomery’s titles tend to be more action and adventure for its own sake and Packard’s tend to be more high concept and sciencey.  The difference between space opera like the hugely mainstream popular stuff like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon vs. the “genre ghetto” of “more serious” science fiction in the Campbellian tradition, if you will. Stuff like Montgomery’s Escape! and The Race Forever and War With the Evil Power Master or even The Abominable Snowman come to mind, while Packard’s titles like Inside UFO 54-40 or Hyperspace certainly seem to fit the bill of trying to be too intellectual instead of too cool and fun and adventurous. Unless my more modern read-through coming up changes that perception of those upcoming titles. Of the books so far, the opposite has been true—Packard’s are more fun and Montgomery’s are more hippy gibberish and navel gazing. Space and Beyond was an insufferably incoherent blend of stock science fiction ideas and shallow proto-woke New Age philosophy, while Packard showed a capability at capturing the important aspects of a given genre, even when he didn’t always have the absolute best ideas out there (spies chasing a secret whale song so that it could be decoded to discover a secret humpback whale hideout, for instance.) And Mystery of the Maya is no exception. In fact, it fits exactly what I had previously called Packard’s MO; it reads like Montgomery had just taken a vacation or cruise ship to Mexico, visited some Maya ruins, gone to the library and read a quick and shallow book about the Maya, and then decided to write a Choose Your Own Adventure book that’s half cultural anthropology treatise, half New Age weirdness. The premise is that you’re a journalist on your first assignment, which is to discover the breaking news of why the Maya civilization disappeared hundreds of years ago (yeah, I know.) While there, most likely you’ll take a magical potion and travel back in time to the Maya age, where you get to interact with the Maya and experience all of the things that some cheap tour guide in Mexico told Montgomery about the ruins that he was looking at at Chichen Itza or Tulum (which is curiously misspelled consistently here as Tulumn. I can only assume that cruises to Mexico weren’t as common in the late 70s and early 80s as they are now.)

While I didn’t particularly love this one as a kid, and when I was divesting myself of some of these titles, I would have loved if someone else picked this one up, in truth, nobody did, so I still have my original copy. Mine appears to be a first printing, from 1981. The trade dress on the spine was the larger colored letters rather than the normal title; a trade dress fluctuation that was briefly flirted with and then abandoned. It claims to have 44 endings on the cover, and there are 134 pages, which really is kind of a crazy endings to page number ratio. Most of these books are about 110-130 or so pages, and a typical number of endings is somewhere in the twenties. The price printed on the cover was $1.50.

One of the reasons that I never liked this one all that much is because it’s also the first book in the series to have a different illustrator, Richard Anderson instead of Paul Grainger. While he’s technically a fine artist, I presume, his style is neither the over-the-top coolness of Grainger, nor something more realistic, like some other illustrators later in the series would do. He feels like a “generic” children’s book illustrator of the era, whereas Grainger was very unique and had a lot of character, like a very specific kind of edgy cartoon or something. Anderson’s illustrations all have big heads, big noses, kind of exaggerated paedomorphic features ($10 word for the day right there. I learned that through reading about dinosaurs, though.) And of course the “you” protagonist is illustrated as a skinny little ten year old looking blonde girl with twin side ponytails. I mentioned briefly in my review of Deadwood City that as a little boy of about nine or ten or so myself, that was never going to be popular, although it doesn’t bother me now, of course. Rather, I’m more bothered by the fact that Anderson’s illustrations simply don’t have the same character or classicness; it feels generic and forgettable, whereas Grainger’s illustrations are iconic and memorable. I don’t remember Anderson doing any more titles, but I admit that I didn’t pay much attention, especially as we got past about title number twenty-five or so. Throughout the teens and twenties a number of other illustrators and even authors were featured.  Of the illustrators, Ralph Reese was a favorite of mine, different to but nearly the equal of Paul Grainger in terms of being iconic to the series. Anthony Kramer I never much liked, but he did plenty around this period too. And, of course, Grainger was still around for a lot of these titles still too. I can only presume that the workload that they were demanding was too much for Grainger to cover it all on his own (or, on the writing side, for Packard and Montgomery to cover on their own.) So, a sad chapter was gradually coming to an end already in the series, as they had to branch out to new creatives that changed the look and feel of the series over time.

Of course, there are books from this era that had illustrators I didn’t much like, but they were books that I liked. Packard’s Underground Kingdom, coming up soon (number eighteen) with Kramer illustrations comes to mind. And hey, it’s a hollow earth Pellucidar-influenced title, so that’s probably why. But the illustrations didn’t sell it, that’s for sure. And some of the new writers were good too. Space Patrol, number twenty-two, was written by Julius Goodman and illustrated by Ralph Reese, and was probably one of my absolute favorites of all of the titles in the series for many years. It was finally the space opera title that I had wanted Space and Beyond and The Third Planet From Altair to be, but they weren’t. But getting back to Mystery of the Maya, while the illustrations certainly didn’t help this title, it was really the written content that was never my favorite. A cultural tourist, even one who goes back in time, just isn’t my favorite idea. There’s not a lot of stuff that you get to choose to do that’s super interesting; sit around watching the priest be creepy, tagging along on a raid against the Toltecs, or tagging along on a mercantile sailing business just isn’t the stuff of high adventure which was always the main attraction of the series.

If for some reason you don’t go back in time, you probably will end up seeing weird Blavatsky-style aliens taking people off world because they’ve decided that they’ve proven worthy. This was obviously written years before the Heaven’s Gate episode, but it’s still strange and creepy even so rather than exciting and adventurous. Ultimately,  this title fails to be one of my favorites because the theme just wasn’t one that I was super interested in in the first place, and because the execution wasn’t as good as most; you’re kind of a passive observer in this weird cultural anthropology case study rather than having adventures of your own. Packard’s upcoming The Forbidden Castle is a better example of what we’d want, because you’re a much more active participant, and because we just have a much more intrinsically close tie to Medieval Europe than we do to classic period Maya civilization. To be honest, I’ve always wondered about the intrinsic  mystery of the Maya, lowercase. Why have the Maya captivated intellectual’s curiously more than the Toltecs just to the west, for instance? The Maya clearly had a civilizational collapse, but the people didn’t go anywhere, and millions of people in the Yucatan still speak languages descended from the Maya language even today. There really doesn’t have to be any explanation for their disappearance, because they didn’t disappear. Simply, their civilization fell and entered a dark age, which was the state that they were in when the  Spanish encountered them. I don’t know that it was any more notable than the dark ages that preceded Classical Greece or followed Classical Rome, though—we just don’t know as much about it.

And that’s kind of my point, Lacking a compelling high concept, and lacking much in the way of anything interesting to say or do within the high concept, the book just is kind of flat. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, it just simply isn’t all that interesting. But before I go summarize the endings that I encountered in this book, let me discuss me and the rest of the series briefly. The next book is number twelve, Inside UFO 54-40. I actually bought this when it was new; this is the first book I the series that I remember anticipating its release and picking it up quickly when it was new. However, it’s not one that I have anymore, and of the ones that I “recovered” and rebought on abebooks or thriftbooks, it’s one that I did not bother with. I never really loved that one, and given the somewhat disappointing run of ten through twelve, I think somewhere around here my perception of the series started to change. Also, as noted above, new illustrators and even new writers started to pop up in the later teens and twenties. And, of course, I was getting older. I discovered these books when I think all eleven that I’ve reviewed so far had already been printed, so about 1981. By the time we get to number twenty, it was 1983 and by the time we get to number 30, it was late 1984, which is admittedly a pretty aggressive publishing schedule. By 1984-1985 or so, I wasn’t a nine or ten year old kid anymore, I was now a twelve or thirteen year old junior high kid, and I was more interested in Dungeons & Dragons, or at best, the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and other similar titles rather than Choose Your Own Adventure, and heck, by then I was already reading Lord of the Rings, Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and other stuff that made Choose Your Own Adventure seem pretty hoaky in comparison. I remember clearly buying number fifty, the Return to the Cave of Time, a kind of fan service title, I think, when it was new at the end of ’85, but I’d already missed most of the titles numbered in  the thirties and forties by then and had kind of wandered into stuff that was more interesting to me. I also don’t remember liking that one as much as I’d hoped to, and I think I bought it as much for the nostalgia bait as anything else. I even picked up a handful of titles here and there when they caught my eye after that, but my relationship with the series was going to hit a point of no return sometime in the twenties.  

I still have all of the titles (minus number twelve, Inside UFO 54-40 as mentioned) up through twenty-three, as well as several other later twenties titles, and some titles from the thirties and forties, but the idea that I’d buy sight-unseen any of these titles took a major hit after being disappointed with this brief run, including today’s title, Mystery of the Maya. 

When I come back to reviewing again, we’ll have another Montgomery title, number thirteen, The Abominable Snowman, followed by Packard’s The Forbidden Castle, Montgomery’s House of Danger (a really crazy one), Packard’s Survival At Sea, Montgomery’s The Race Forever, Packard’s The Underground Kingdom, and Richard Brightfield’s Secret of the Pyramids. That one breaks up the Packard/Montgomery run with the addition of some new talent, and marks another turning point in the series, so there’s no reason to talk (quite yet) about what it does after that. I’m curious if my experience now will match my memories and impressions from decades ago, but some of the later teens and early twenties titles were always among my favorites in the series, including The Abominable Snowman, The Race Forever, Escape! and Space Patrol. Which is probably why I had a more favorable opinion of Montgomery’s work in the series than I’ve actually seen so far. 

Anyway, as is my wont, here's some of the things that I did while investigating the mystery of the Maya:

• traveled in space with aliens, just like the ancient Maya apparently. More than once.
• didn't travel in space with aliens like the ancient Maya, because I blew my big chance
• got sacrificed by the Mayan priesthood
• went on a raid against the Toltecs, but it was a weird raid because nobody was hurt or lost or anything. I wrote about my experiences.
• got killed by a spear in the back during a raid
• got kidnapped and held for ransom after falling all the way through the earth and ending up in China
• Also got put in prison by corrupt Mexican officials
• got lost in the jungle while on a raid, but made it back alive with a couple of friends
• passed out in the jungle on a raid, but woke up in the modern era again
• tried to get buried treasure that I knew about from my trip to the past, but it was gone and I got buried alive in a cave in
• escaped the police by going to the past
• get lost in the jungle and died
• was the lone survivor of a Mayan shipwreck, but was transported back to the modern era and wrote my book
• get stuck in some kind of time loop in a Mayan boat, where I can see cruise ships but can't interact with them.
• talk about a revolt against the Mayan priesthood, but after reviewing the challenges, end up in the present again instead.
• came back to the present in a dangerous situation and worried about where to go to dinner
• got a mysterious package claiming to be from the Plumed Serpent himself, telling me to go home because my own people are in danger and need my help
• got a clay good luck charm and sent back to the present
• went to recover treasure, but it was already stolen
• went to recover treasure, but the Mexican government showed up and claimed it. I apparently didn't mind, because it went to a museum.
• got involved in Mexican revolutionary politics, but ran off back to Miami and said forget it
• witnessed a Mayan plague, and then came back to the present and wrote a book about it
• joined the revolutionary Red Hand gang and became a terrorist and a criminal, but of course, Montgomery romanticizes it
• joined the Red Hand, got arrested, and faced a firing squad
• got stuck in the past, but couldn't communicate with anyone
• zoomed around to various periods in the past, saw the post collapse Mayan landscape, came back and wrote my book
• went to the Region of Light in space and got bossed around by some alien consciousness
• wrote a book, started a lecture series and became a famous Mayan scholar
• got killed by a poisoned arrow
• a couple of different endings where I tried to stay in the past or something, and exactly what happens is a little confusing but seems unhappy. Like I'm suddenly sitting on a beach alone, not sure if I'm in the past or the present; weirdo Montgomery stuff like that
• watched the Mayan civilization fall, a few times. Not even clear if I came back to the past or not in at least two of these endings
• went into space, but came back as some kind of messenger of hippy new-agism
• didn't go to space, but wrote a book about aliens and the Maya
• stuck in the past as a laborer carving on the pyramid
• sacrificed by the Toltecs instead of the Mayas
• Became king or something of the Toltecs and refused to go back. Twice, even
• became a herald of a Mayan god or something

CYOA #10: The Lost Jewels of Nabooti by R. A. Montgomery

When I first discovered the Choose Your Own Adventure series, back in third grade or whatever age exactly that I was, I'm pretty sure that the first eleven titles had already been released. I have a clear memory of the launch of title #12 Inside UFO 54-40 and walking to the mall where there was a Waldenbooks, and buying it when it was still new. (I miss the days of walking to the mall and perusing the shelves of Waldenbooks. Sigh.) The Lost Jewels of Nabooti is one that I had when I was a kid, but I lost it at some point, and rebought it relatively recently. The copy that I have now is a first printing, from March 1981, and has a cover price of $1.75; already a decent price up from the $1.50 cover prices I used to have. My older copy must have been a later printing, as it had the alternate spine trade dress. But my copies of #8 Deadwood City and #11 Mystery of the Maya look to be first printings, and they have the alternate spine design too, as well as a $1.50 cover price. Not quite sure what exactly was happening with the trade dress and printings here. Maybe not all copies actually tell me that it's a second, third, fourth, etc. printing, so my assumption that it's a first printing isn't correct.

In any case, because its an early Montgomery title, and he (or his estate) now owns the brand now under the Chooseco company, it's been reprinted and retitled, and slightly reworked. A newer reprint says that it has 38 possible endings, but my cover says that there are 36. I've since found that sometimes those counts aren't completely accurate, but more likely there were changes made to the text. Montgomery's titles, relative to Packard's, seem to have less text before making a choice, and more endings. He doesn't (or at least hasn't yet) had much in the way of structure; the choices are kind of all over the map, and the results are even more all over the map. Whereas in #9 Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? for instance, there was one solution to who the murderer was, and the choices just gave you different ways of interacting with the same story, in Montgomery's titles, for the most part, every choice could lead you to some random idea that Montgomery had. Some of them truly are random and have little to do with the theme of the story at all. I haven't decided yet if I think this is a good thing or a bad thing. One advantage of it is that Montgomery can add all kinds of ideas as they come to him and not limit himself to a smaller box. Although honestly, Montgomery's ideas aren't as great as all that sometimes. And of course, limits aren't necessarily bad; would Harlowe Thrombey have been better if there were more endings where other suspects were actually guilty? I suspect not. It would have just felt haphazard instead, and there would ideally have needed to be some set-up before the narrative veered in a different direction. Montgomery doesn't often give us this set-up, which makes his books sometimes feel a bit like an acid trip where stuff just randomly jumps out of nowhere and happens. I suppose as a kid, where punchy narrative that was fast-paced was better than set-up, description, characterization, etc. this didn't bother me at all, but it does now. I remember thinking from my younger days that Montgomery was the author who did all kinds of crazy exciting adventure story ideas and Packard was the guy who occasionally tried to be more educational, stuffy and lectury. After reviewing the first ten titles so far, six by Packard, three by Montgomery and one by a one-and-done guest author, I don't think that that's the case at all anymore. Packard wrote some great titles where he really iconically encapsulated various genres and Montgomery did a bunch of weird hippy propagandizing disguised as adventure. We'll see if this trend continues: the next book up is #11 Mystery of the Maya also by Montgomery, and then I never rebought #12, a Packard title, so after reading two Montgomery titles in a row, I'll read... another Montgomery title, #13 The Abominable Snowman. I remember quite liking that one, but we'll see what I think about it when I get to it. I don't remember really loving #10 or especially #11 very much, although the latter might be because it has a new illustrator who's work I didn't like, who also illustrated you, the protagonist, as a young girl in pigtails.

Lost Jewels should have been right up my alley when I was a kid. It's got exotic, globe-trotting spy-like action all throughout. The story begins when your cousins contact you that their father's prized possession, the allegedly mystical titular jewels have been stolen and they've been threatened to walk away. You're whisked off almost immediately for Paris and later Morocco to help find them, and right away suspicious things start happening, weird people are following or threatening you, and you get weird hippy mysticism thrown at you, which you're supposed to accept without any second thought. Although, to be fair, as a nine or ten year old kid, I'm pretty sure that that's exactly what I did.

Although it sounds great on paper, even at the time, this wasn't one of my favorite titles. I liked it well enough as a kid, but I didn't love it, and it's one that I didn't read after I lost my copy of it for a long time, nor did I miss it even as much as some other titles that are arguably not even as good (Montgomery's own #2 Journey Under the Sea, for instance.) Something about it just didn't click with me as a kid. As an adult, I didn't really love it either, but for very different reasons; it's just too unfocused, all over the map in strange ways, and has too much unexplained and bizarre hippy mysticism. There are also a lot of endings where you get involved with some Wakanda-like hippy Illuminati organization, that despite their obviously shady dealings we're supposed to be OK with, because they gratuitously toss around the word peace in their mission statement. I do admit that my own current political, social and cultural beliefs seem to put me at odds more and more with Montgomery's work; the idea that an African-based Illuminati could possibly be good for anyone just beggars the imagination, yet Montgomery clearly thought so. His career in academia and proto-globalist NGOs didn't seem sinister in the 80s when I was a kid, but it does now.

That said, I don't want to think that every Montgomery book will end up being a social commentary, or that my own commentary on his social commentary will swallow up any other commentary about the book. I'll say instead that my impression of this book as an adult is similar to what it was as a kid; on paper it looks great, but in actuality, the end result is pretty mid. Even his exciting and good ideas don't get enough development to be the least bit satisfying, and the way the plot unfolds by bouncing around unaccountably and without much thought to any reasonable justification for why your choices lead you to where they do just isn't all that fun. And some things, which I probably didn't notice as a kid, are kind of cringey now, like the inclusion of his two sons Anson and Ramsey as cameos, or the odd references at several points to exciting adventurer Beech Muzzwell, who despite your best efforts you never actually meet in the book. At one point, there's a choice to literally just give up; it doesn't take you to any page, it just ends the story. The idea that anyone would actually do that is kind of depressing; is the book so bad and incoherent that you'd be looking for an excuse to just quit reading it and bail?

I know a few adult fans of the series look at this one, and Montgomery's #15 House of Danger as kind of high points in the series, at least in terms of liking them for being so insane; kind of like how you like really bad b-movies that are so bad that they wrap around to being good again because they're so bonkers. I'm not quite sure that this accomplishes that; it's not bad enough, for one thing, although I do see how fans of the series could hold that opinion.

All in all, although I don't regret rebuying this book, and having it in my collection, the chances that I will ever again in my lifetime at this point feel like reading it again are very low. If you're a completionist kind of collector, or one who expects to be entertained by the gonzo incoherence of the story I suggest checking it out; otherwise give it a pass. If you do, however, do not get any of the reprints with the new art and edited text. I've said before that I dislike all of that in every title that I've ever seen, but in this one if particular, if you're going to pick it up for either of those reasons, you need an original trade dress, original text and original Paul Grainger art copy of the book. I don't think this is Grainger's best work or anything, but Grainger is always preferable to any other illustrator who worked on this series, with the possible exception of Ralph Reese, and he does have some nice pieces here, including some high intensity action shots, and a moody Paris street scene by night, and a few others. We didn't realize how badly we needed Grainger until the next book, however, where we got a different illustrator for the first time. Grainger still did pretty steady work on the series for many more volumes, but eventually his work kind of petered out, and it was truly the end of an era. The less there were Grainger illustrations, the less I found myself very entranced with the series. Part of that was my own natural aging and moving beyond the target market for these kinds of books, but part of it was that Grainger just had more personality and style than almost anyone else who followed in his wake.

Anyway, let's get to summarizing the crazy things that happened to me while reading:

• While trying to recruit Beech Muzzwell, I get a call from the FBI that he's been kidnapped. Peter, Lucy and I give up.
• I blow up in a totally random terrorist attack in the Parisian subway.
• I get kidnapped and taken to some remote rural cabin, where a tarantula bites me and I die. (It's worth noting that in the real world, no fatality has ever been attributed to a tarantula bite.)
• I get accused of stealing the jewels myself, get tied up in red tape with the French police, and the embassy suggests that I go home and stay out of trouble.
• I get shot by some mysterious shady people in Morocco.
• Too many suspicious people are following me. After taking a hydrofoil from North Africa to Spain, I go home and give up.
• Montgomery's own son is called to Paris, but disappears. You give up the quest for the jewels and decide to find him instead.
• The jewels mysteriously appear in my pocket and I give them to some weird African wise man, who turns into a young, good-looking hippy Messiah before my very eyes. lolwut!?
• The jewels don't mysteriously appear in my pocket, the old man gets angry, and I walk out in the streets of Tangiers confused and unsure what I'm going to do next. But the story ends anyway. Also lolwut.
• I fall into a trapdoor (see illustration on back cover) and die of starvation or dehydration or something because nobody ever comes and gets me.
• I'm on a plane that is randomly hijacked by someone who has nothing to do with the jewels, but carries me and our plane off to China. Twice, in fact.
• I'm in a helicopter that is shot with a rocket launcher and blows up in rural France. Literally don't even know who shot me.
• A midget dressed like a little girl walks up to me with a dog that turns out to be robotic, and which also turns out to be a bomb that blows up and kills me.
• My plane gets shot down in Africa, and has to make an emergency landing in the desert. Without any survival gear, it's heavily implied that I'll die of exposure shortly.
• I went to the shores of Lake Chad, met the mysterious Nabooti tribe, and the jewels had mysteriously been returned to them, and peace is mystically flowing out of Lake Chad to the whole world. Even though I didn't have anything to do with their return, I'm congratulated on doing a great job anyway.
• I go to club Nabooti somewhere in Africa and find that the jewels were sold so that the resort could be financed. Who stole them from my cousins? How did they end up here? These are the kinds of questions that Montgomery rarely thinks to address in his endings.
• I go to Club Nabooti and find that it's actually not a resort, it's a training area for the hippy Illuminati organization called Nabooti, which I join.
• I get a random cable while in Paris that Peter and Lucy somehow got the jewels back and I should go home.
• I get the jewels, but they've been ground to powder.
• I once again and even more randomly join the hippy Illuminati.
• I end up in Greece after the hijacking affair mentioned above, and I like Greece enough that I bail on my cousins and just start working for an English language newspaper there as a journalist.
• I get kidnapped and stuffed in a trash can behind a restaurant. But for some reason I escape, give up and go home, complaining about smelling like fries and mustard.
• I get thrown out of a plane, but miraculously land unharmed in a farm pond. And then the story ends, even though that hardly seems like an ending.
• I get thrown into a French prison for charges that are... unclear... but I'm promised a long, tedious legal battle before I can do anything else again.
• I meet the crown prince of the Nabooti tribe or nation or whatever exactly it's supposed to be, but he's impressed that I seem to have a larcenous bent. It's implied that I'll join him in a criminal enterprise of some kind.
• I'm in the streets of Paris where I'm warned to run for my life. For some reason I stand around confused, and eventually find out that Run For Your Life is a rock band throwing an impromptu concert right there on the streets. I'm told to chill out, relax and enjoy the music, presumably forgetting all about the jewels. I think Montgomery may have literally just smoked a joint when he wrote that one.
• It turns out that the real jewels of Nabooti aren't really jewels; they're actually the four leaders of the hippy Illuminati organization. The way Montgomery describes the one I meet makes him sound like a insurrectionist and a terrorist, but I'm supposedly brave for helping smuggle him somewhere or something.
• I'm warned by some hoodoo symbol of dead mice not to touch the jewels of Nabooti, but I do and I'm struck by lightning. Inside a hut. The jewels vanish and I'm not worthy or something.
• Instead, I leave my African buddy with the jewels and head down the oddly alpine mountain glacier in western Africa, where I fall in a crevasse and die. 
• I randomly get the jewels in a package, and they feel warm, peaceful and mystical when I have them.
• In another ending, I'm randomly given the jewels by someone I just met.
• Somehow, in spite of the fact that they were just stolen from my cousins, they are in a museum back in America, and the exhibit that showcases them is so popular that there's a new hit single called "Do the Nabooti" playing out in the street, lolwut.
• I'm in a boat that crashes at the Pillars of Hercules and all hands are lost.
• I'm taken hostage, along with my cousin and a French gendarme inspector, where it's implied that the jewels aren't delivered and we'll all get our heads cut off.
• I go up on the Eiffel Tower and look at the lights of Paris by night and consider that maybe they're the real jewels of Nabooti. Lolwut, yet again.
• I get a floating cutlass with the jewels of Nabooti set in the hilt, and I'm chosen as the new guardian for the jewels. Suck it, Peter and Lucy, who are conveniently forgotten about once again!
• A confusing and incoherent few sentences where I'm told I'll never find the jewels and I guess I just give up.

CYOA: #9 Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? by Edward Packard

The final title in the five-book run of Edward Packard classics is #9, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?, a classic murder mystery. Packard does a good job of trying to hit the rather strict beats of this very specific genre; the rich guy in his country estate mansion, murdered while a number of suspects, all with their own reasons to be suspicious, are all present. It also has the bumbling police detective and his rivalry of sorts with the brilliant amateur, played by you. The detective is even called Inspector Prufrock, even though Inspector isn't, of course, a title in American police structure. 

You supposedly have a reputation as an amateur detective, sufficiently so that wealthy plastics tycoon Harlowe Thrombey calls you because he's worried about his life and wants someone to keep an eye on things to protect him. In this, you're destined to fail, because no matter what happens, Harlowe Thrombey gets murdered; that's the whole point of the book—you trying to determine who did it.

Immediate suspects include his disgruntled wife Jane, his niece Angela and her boyfriend Dr. Robert Libscomb, as well as nephew Chartwell. Yes, it's really spelled like that. The cook Helga and the gardener Jenkins aren't really presented as suspects, but they are people that you can also talk to.

My copy is, I believe, a first printing (at least it doesn't mention being a subsequent printing) dated February 1981, and the cover price was $1.50. Unlike almost every other Choose Your Own Adventure title, it doesn't announce how many possible endings there are in this book on the cover; rather it simply says in the same place that you're the detective and it's your first murder case! I suspect that's because this book has considerably fewer endings than any published so far (and most published afterwards). I counted thirteen is all, compared to numbers in the upper twenties to mid-forties for a typical variant of this kind of book. Like all books in the series (so far) it was illustrated by Paul Grainger

My understanding is that this is considered one of the real classics of the genre. Not that this means that I recommend the movie or anything, but Knives Out makes overt homage to this book by naming the murder victim, played by Christopher Plumber, Harlan Thrombey. (It's really too bad that Knives Out wasn't a better movie.)

The structure of this book is a little bit unusual too. Not only do we have, as mentioned, very few endings, but there are a lot of branches that don't really branch at all. Immediately after the murder, for instance, you can question any of the four suspects, or search the pantry for clues, but after doing so for a brief page, all of them lead you to the same next page where the police in the form of Inspector Prufrock arrives. While you aren't exactly expected to solve the mystery yourself from the clues, given the nature of the book as a Choose Your Own Adventure written in the second person, it does allow you to gather the clues that you will gather, and ignore the ones that you will. There are more situations like this where you can interview a certain character, but regardless of what you pick, you go to the same place, presumably with having gathered whatever information you gathered by the choice that you made, and whatever you didn't by the choice that you chose not to make.

There's also a page near the end that you are very likely to end up at no matter what you've chosen where it simply says "WHAT WILL YOU DO NEXT?" with a small image of the brandy bottle that contained the poison that killed Thrombey, and then it gives you a dozen potential choices to make. By this point in the book, you're in the end game. A few of them are red herrings, and you're told that there's no information there, and sent back to the same page to pick something else, but many of them lead to the some of the endings that you end up with.

There's not really multiple guilty parties either, depending on the choice. In every case, the same suspects are innocent and guilty, although there some ancillary secondary characters that may or may not make an appearance, including a hitman named Keane, a rival young detective named Jenny Mudge (more on her on later posts) and the iconic Choose Your Own Adventure lawyer, Gilliam Prem.

While I can't say that a quintessentially British rich country estate murder mystery is my favorite genre by any means, this is one of the better classic titles, and it's really quite clever how Packard structured and wrote it to evoke that genre as well as he did. This is one of the classics of the series; absolutely one of the best to get your hands on if you care to get your hands on any of these at all. I thoroughly enjoyed this one, and it is probably one of the best of the early titles. Packard really showed, especially with these five in a row, that he could absolutely call up the classic tells of all kinds of genres, and make them work effectively. In fact, I think that that may be a big part of the appeal of the earliest classic titles in the series; while many later titles are also quite good, they weren't just iconic representations of a specific genre anymore after this.

After this, we have two R. A. Montgomery titles, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti and Mystery of the Maya, the first book to have a different illustrator. After that, is Inside UFO 54-40, the first in the series that 1) I don't have anymore and don't intend to replace, and 2) that I remember being released when it was new after I'd already discovered and fallen in love with the series. At some point here too, the series entered a new phase, even if only in my own perception; it was becoming more established and the novelty was being replaced by other things. For instance, in #14, The Forbidden Castle, Packard starts to become self-referential; you get to the middle ages through the Cave of Time, which he assumes you know about because you've read The Cave of Time before. New artists, and shortly afterwards, new authors start to populate the series, which changes the look and feel of the series a fair bit. Not that these new artists and authors are necessarily bad; I think Ralph Reese is every bit Grainger's equal and nearly as quintessential and classic to the series as Grainger himself, but others just don't really have the right look, some of them have a softer little kid approach and just in general, as the series matures and becomes more established, some of the classic appeal starts to wear off. Not that this happened too quickly; some of my favorite titles, at least when I was young (we'll see if I still think so on re-reading them shortly) are in the late teens and twenties, although by the twenties, I've also started to feel like there's a lot of missable titles in the series that I don't care to collect.

That said, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? is certainly a title when the series was at its peak, and is a must-have. Let's review the endings that I encountered, shall we?

• I solved the case, and Prufrock rushed off to arrest the guilty party without thanking me. Twice, actually.
• I solved the case and got a $5,000 check for my trouble.
• I got hit on the head, and while recovering in the hospital, my rival and friend Jenny Mudge solved the case instead. People are now talking about her as the prodigy detective instead of me.
• I get shot and murdered by a hitman that I'm trying to question.
• I solve the case by cornering the hitman and turning him over to the police so he can spill all the details about what happened.
• Jenny solved the case by sitting behind the guilty parties at a movie and listening to them talk about how they did it.
• Bumbling inspector Prufrock actually solves the case instead of me.
• I got shot and murdered by the murderer.
• Jenny and I solve the murder together by comparing clues and decide to become partners.
• I give up on the case.
• I'm in the classic "all of the suspects and the Inspector in the library" scene where I accuse the guilty party in front of everyone and solve the case in the very classic British whodunit resolution scene.
• I solve the case, but it's kind of a cop-out, because the book doesn't actually tell me the resolution, just that apparently I solved it and told Prufrock exactly what happened.

CYOA: #8 Deadwood City by Edward Packard

https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2022/02/choose-your-own-adventure.html

Deadwood City is an interesting case. It is one of the original run of the first printing of the first titles in the Bantam Series. I even have a first printing myself, I believe, from 1980 (cover price $1.50). It was in the relatively small pile of these books that were available to me when I first discovered the series. I even read it back then.

I did not, however, buy this one until very recently, and it's not one that really stood out to me as a kid. And as such, it went under my radar a bit for many, many years. However, I did have some memories of it from the beginning and I did want to eventually pick it up, and since the reasons that I was not interested in it as an 8-10 year old kid faded away or were even aggressively replaced, I found that I was curious about it again.

Deadwood City, like a few others that I've reviewed so far, is one of the ones Packard published with a smaller press along with Montgomery before getting picked up by Bantam, so in that sense, it predates the series proper. (It is also, allegedly, from this printing that the series title was derived; a tagline was attached to the book that said "Choose your own adventure in the Wild West!" However, this is just a curiosity; I don't consider the series to have started properly until the mass market Bantam paperbacks came out with the Bantam trade dress and the Paul Grainger (or later, other artist) illustrations and covers. After all, small local printers wouldn't likely to have been able to distribute books nationwide, so until I could walk into Waldenbooks the mall and find them or even the bookshelf section of Walmart, they effectively didn't exist.

The more interesting challenge for this title was that it was a western. When I was an eight year old boy in 1980, westerns were an old-fashioned genre that I had little interest in. They were the movies and TV shows from my dad's childhood, and although he still watched some of the classic John Wayne's and whatnot with me, and I think even syndicated reruns of Bonanza and Rawhide would pop up on TV from time to time (and I know for sure that The Lone Ranger did too) I just wasn't very interested in Westerns. The whole plot element from Pixar's early Toy Story movies where Woody is replaced by a "space toy" is pretty much exactly own childhood; space toys in the wake of Star Wars were sexy, and westerns were not. I had also always been a big fan of fantasy and other exotica even before I was old enough to read Tolkien and Alexander. Not only did I have Star Wars action figures, but I also had toy dinosaurs, dragons and even a few knights with swords and stuff like that, and in 1980 my favorite cartoon on TV was Thundarr the Barbarian. I wouldn't say that I avoided Deadwood City because it was a western; I do remember reading it at least a few times, but because it was a western, I wasn't nearly as interested in it as I was in the more gratuitously exotic titles in the series. Like our last foray, The Third Planet From Altair, which I was probably more interested in that it deserved, just because of the spacey science fiction topical matter.

Of course, this has all changed for me as I've gotten older. I've really come to appreciate the western as a genre a great deal. Even before playing Red Dead Redemption titles on the playstation, I'd come to see the western as a genre that kind of defined America and Americans in many ways; Americans working out what their identity was in the wake of the Civil War, the destruction of the free, defederalized political realm that had been our previous identity, and attempting to justify and validate our expansionist and even imperialist policies via some kind of Manifest Destiny. Either that, or the attempt to leave behind the corrupted post-Civil War country and make a new, freer life on the frontier, which is less cynical but which more closely resembles the text of this book, anyway. And while those may seem mutually exclusive, I don't think that they are. Questions of national identity are complicated and fuzzy. But again, I see the western as the iconic American genre in many ways, and certainly up through much of the 60s, so did most Americans. Revisionist westerns still lingered as a relatively popular concept through the 70s, but they were fading from the public consciousness at the time I found this book, and revisionist westerns weren't really westerns either; they just shared the same superficial trappings and setting.

Anyway, long story short (too late) I've come to appreciate the western. Not just for its stunning, epic Rocky Mountain and intermountain desert scenery, although I've also developed a very strong love for that over the decades as well, but for the themes and message of the classic western as a storytelling form.

The second reason that I was hesitant was the artwork. Marketing used to say that girls didn't mind identifying with boy characters (part of the reason Rowling wrote Harry Potter instead of Hermione Grainger as her main character) but that the reverse wasn't true. I also believe that the Choose Your Own Adventure stories, representing the classic boy's adventure tales as they often do, probably appealed more to boys than to girls in general. If either of those were true, and especially if both were true, the decision that Bantam made to have Grainger illustrate the protagonist as a girl was an unusual one. I'm taking it for granted that such was Bantam's decision, although it may well have been Packard's or even Grainger's himself for all I know (the original pre-Bantam printing has the protagonist character look like a guy, although illustrated in a very cartoony children's book fashion so he looks more like a generic little kid than anything else.) And, I have to admit that as a little kid, that was pretty off-putting to me. As I've gotten older, I learned to not be overly concerned about that, of course. In fact, I think Grainger's illustrations have really grown on me even more, and Deadwood City has some of his best work. There's sweeping scenic vistas, exciting action shots, and highly detailed studies with lots going on in places like saloons and whatnot. His illustration of Kurt Malloy, the iconic outlaw villain, is positively edgy, with him have bullet-shaped sharp teeth and exaggerated villain appeal. Great stuff, as always from Grainger, but I really think this is some of his best.

According to the cover, there are 37 possible endings. I noticed that most of them seem to be positive. There are some where you die, of course, or otherwise fail to accomplish anything noteworthy, but for the most part, in most of the endings things seem to work out well, if perhaps lacking in over-the-top flair. As I've gotten older, I think that I appreciate the lack of over-the-topness considerably too. Enjoying work on a ranch, saving up and eventually buying my own actually sounds really, really attractive to me now, whereas as an eight year old in the early 80s, I'm sure it seemed kind of boring. In fact, all of the choices and structure of the book probably seemed boring to me as a kid; it was the iconic "sandbox." Rather than a plot that it tried to force on you, it just had all kinds of things that you could do that were iconically western, and you just decided which ones to pursue and wandered through them. You could work on a ranch, you could become a prospector, you could ride shotgun on a stagecoach, you could get involved in high stakes poker, you could tangle with an outlaw gang, you could encounter Indians, etc. But again, this increased its subtlety in a way that makes it more attractive to me now.

It's funny that it took me becoming an older adult, developing a love of the west from hiking through it, and a love for the western after seeing Hollywood destroy so many other of our genres, for me to really appreciate the more subtle and understated Deadwood City, but I've come to find that of the ones I've reviewed so far, it's one that I think ranks near the top, and I'd heartily recommend it to any collector. With the caveat, of course, that you get an older copy with the Grainger cover and original trade dress. It doesn't look like this title made the jump into any subsequent series or reprints from other companies, but it did get reprinted with new cover art at some point, which has a more generic mid-80s look to it.

Anyway, let's explore some of the endings I encountered:

• lived with an Indian tribe for a few months, teaching them English. Left with long-lasting Indian friendship.
• as owner of a new Deadwood City newspaper, I made a difference in the lawlessness of the community as an old west version of an active and committed concerned citizen.
• avoided tough subjects in said newspaper, lost readership, and had to sell my printing press and move to California.
• become a respected journalist for reporting fairly on the cattle/sheep controversy in my newspaper.
• Pick a side in the cattle/sheep controversy, and end up losing circulation and having to move back east where I work at a Chicago paper.
• after a dispute with a corrupt partner, I chase him off and go back to town with a bag of gold. Twice, actually, although in one ending, it's described as saddlebags full of gold, which sounds like quite a bit more.
• didn't confront my corrupt partner, and was left in town broke.
• got a lousy job at a lousy ranch, hated the food and the work and the conditions. Nice picture of me huddled in a coat on my horse in a blizzard, though.
• struggle on a cattle ranch against aggressive sheepherders, but eventually raise prize winning bulls and become famous and fortunate.
• take a lousy ranch job for a few weeks, but move on to California. Although this ending doesn't sound particularly attractive, it has the single best two-page spread of artwork. I really wonder if Grainger had either been to, or at least worked from a picture of, Sublette Mountain and the Brooks Lake area just east of Yellowstone in Wyoming.
• become a carpenter, get really good at my job, and eventually earn enough money to buy my own ranch.
• infiltrate Kurt Malloy's gang, but feed information to the sheriff who arrives with a posse. My help in getting him arrested makes me famous in Deadwood City and roundabouts.
• get a nice job at the Tumbleweed Ranch, where my boss likes me and I like the work, saying that leaving Deadwood City was the best choice I ever made.
• try to escape internment in an Indian camp, but ended up not making it.
• joined Malloy's gang and got arrested.
• joined a big cattle drive, although then the story stopped.
• have a friendly Indian trade encounter, and then move on to Santa Fe, where I'm happy that I'm not in Deadwood City anymore.
• have an unfriendly Indian encounter where I become a pincushion for arrows.
• after dealing with a bully on the staff of the Red Creek, I became the ranch manager. In another similar ending, I eventually bought the ranch myself after managing it.
• in a third similar ending, I don't become the ranch manager, but I hear that the bully is arrested for armed robbery
• made a bunch of money playing poker, and quit while I was ahead, walking smugly out of the saloon.
• lost all of my money playing poker, slept in a barn, and left town for Silver Springs and hopefully better luck.
• got a lousy job at the saloon, but as soon as I could, I quit and headed for California.
• got a great ranch job that I really liked, decided I may stay there forever.
• went to Silver Springs were everyone is excited to hear that the railroad will come through. I went to Kansas to work for the rail.
• stuck through some tough times on a sheep ranch, until the railroad came along and we could sell our sheep back east. Became ranch manager.
• went and got the marshal; arrested Kurt Malloy who, it turns out, is a coward and gives up quickly when one of his men is shot.
• got chased out of town by Malloy.
• three endings where I successfully protected gold on the stagecoach, and became a hero. In at least one, I decide that I really like the excitement and keep doing this job. The others, it doesn't mention my future plans at all.
• cross the desert to Silver Springs and work on a family friend's ranch.
• died of thirst trying to cross the desert to Silver Springs. Twice, although in one, a rattlesnake was the final straw, but I was only bit because I was delirious and exhausted because of thirst.
• went to Denver to negotiate with the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of some Indians who want peace.
• deal with some aggressive cow ranchers on behalf of a sheep ranch. End up settling down, raising a family, and commenting that I couldn't wish for a better life.

Again, subtle and non-flashy compared to many other titles, but that's one of its best points in retrospect. I have one more of the Edward Packard initial run left to do, Who Killed Harlow Thrombey? after which I'll have a slight run (three titles) of Montgomery ones. I don't remember really loving two of the three, but I haven't read them in decades either, so we'll see how it goes. 

There aren't, actually, three Mongtomery titles in a row, but I'm missing two titles from the original first 25 titles, and #12 Inside UFO 54-40 is one of them. I actually used to own that, but when I didn't anymore, it didn't make the cut to be rebought. I remember being pretty disappointed in it when I had it. For reference, the other one I'm missing is #24 Lost on the Amazon, so one of the early Packard and one early Montgomery titles. After that, it's pretty spotty what I have, so I'll start skipping a lot more. But that's still quite a ways away. 

We'll see how it goes. Some of the ones that I still have, I still have because nobody else wanted them. Mystery of the Maya is one that had this problem, for instance. On the other hand, I have some fond memories of some of the titles in the teens and early twenties. There will probably be some mixed reviews coming up still.

CYOA: #7 The Third Planet From Altair by Edward Packard

https://dark-fantasy-x.blogspot.com/2022/02/choose-your-own-adventure.html

Continuing our run of Edward Packard titles that were released all in a row, we get to #7: The Third Planet From Altair. This is, like several other of this early single digit run, a book that predates the series as we know it; it was published prior to the deal with Bantam. The text is copyright 1979, and the Paul Grainger illustrations are copyright 1980. I actually think this is a first printing that I have (at least, it makes no mention of any other printings) from 1980, and the cover price is $1.50. It has 117 pages (although the last one, as a few others within, is just a full page illustration) and it has 38 possible endings according to the cover.

When I first discovered the series, I naturally gravitated immediately to this one, because it's a space adventure, I was an 8 year old boy, and it was smack dab in the post Star Wars era; right as Empire Strikes Back was about to be or just had been in theatres, and stuff like Battlestar Galactica was on TV. However, I'm not really sure that those are the best analogs for this book. I had said in some earlier reviews that it was a space opera, but that's not really true. It's more a first contact adventure that's considerably more science fictiony in a more traditional, blue, "smart men with screwdrivers" kind of way. This wasn't nearly as compelling a story as space opera to me, and in some ways it's even less so now. Sadly, the Choose Your Own Adventure series really wasn't all that interested in space opera, even though it launched in a gilded age of Star Wars-inspired derivative space opera. It wasn't until #22 Space Patrol by Julius Goodman that we actually got what can pass for an honest to goodness space opera, and CYOA only dipped its toes in it occasionally (one of the very early reviews I did in this series, Space Vampire also by Edward Packard is one, curiously. It's also #71 in the series.)

When I was in Argentina years ago, I popped into a small bookstore in Buenos Aires, and found Spanish translations of the Star Challenge series, by Christopher Black. It's only a ten book series, and I only have 5-6 of the titles, but those are all space opera. The Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks series had four within the first 20 titles, even though it mostly focused on fantasy (as the series title suggests). Even the Endless Quest series by TSR, which was mostly focused on Dungeons & Dragons themed CYOA type books had two titles based on Star Frontiers space opera game by the time it is in the mid-teens in number of books. (As well as two titles based on the spy game Top Secret and one based on weirdo post-apocalyptic game Gamma World that was a kind of Thundarr the Barbarian setting, with sword & sorcery influences pretty front and center.) It always seemed odd to me that Packard and Montgomery seemed to avoid the genre. I suspect that, like many from their generation, they simply assumed that it was too frivolous compared to "real" science fiction. Looking at sales numbers of science fiction over the decades, that's a very hard position to defend. Space Opera was popular. Smug anti-space opera science fiction wasn't, at least not with mass audiences. It would have been even more difficult to defend this point of view in the wake of the success of the original trilogy Star Wars movies and the many, many derivative space opera titles that were successful in the movies, TV, and books in the early 80s.

That said, that's probably too much detail about what the book is not. Just because Third Planet isn't space opera doesn't mean that it doesn't offer a decent experience, and a much better spacefaring story than Montgomery's Space and Beyond (which you'll remember that my review of was not very positive.)

You're part of a mission to track down some signals received from the titular planet, on a spaceship called Aloha with a four-man crew, counting yourself. It's kind of an odd crew, you've got Bud Stanton, a leaner version of the Paul Grainger illustration of a dark haired big chinned manly fellow, but you've also got Henry Pickens who looks vaguely like Einstein's significantly older cousin or something. Seriously; the guy's illustrated like his in his mid-80s at least. He has no business going on a space exploration mission, even if he is super smart. And it introduced one of Packard's favorite "NPCs", Dr. Nera Vivaldi, a sensibly dressed lady scientist with shoulder-length black hair who I believe is meant to be attractive. The protagonist, i.e. you is illustrated to look like a slightly androgynous 14-year old boy with Hardy Boys length blond hair. It's another one of those "best not to think too much about it or ask" who thought sending a teenaged boy who's still pretty short and physically underdeveloped on a space mission. 

We still haven't gotten to the A and B story trees format yet at this point in the series; there's basically one story about antimatter storms threatening to destroy the planets of Altair, so funky aliens are coming to Earth as refugees—or colonists, perhaps. It's not actually clear if their intentions are friendly, although I believe we're supposed to assume that they are. 

There are two completely separate illustrations of the aliens that look very different from each other, although both seem to be inspired by the alien beach ball of Dark Star as well as Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum from Disney's Alice in Wonderland. And there are also some furry alien guys who look like lean humanoid guinea pigs, and there is another weird Wonderland-looking alien from the sixth planet from Altair that you meet in one ending. 

Curiously, there aren't very many endings that feel really all that successful, if you know what I mean. I mean, there are plenty where you survive, and several where you make first contact, but even those you usually feel like you're being rushed off by looming antimatter storms, and you're often specifically told that you didn't complete your entire mission. There's also much less acid trippy 2001 stuff in this book than in Montgomery's two books so far, but since you saw a bit of that in Packard's The Cave of Time, it's not surprising that there's some here too. Aliens take you to another dimension, which Packard conveniently doesn't tell you anything about because the story stops. It's a bit of a shame; this was the very first title that I was drawn to, by the title itself and the cover art (people say don't judge a book by its cover, but a good cover is the best sales-pitch a book can make) but reading it again recently, I've found that I don't think that it's aged as well as I'd hoped it would. It's not bad, but it just isn't really quite as exciting as one would hope for it to be, unfortunately. And I kind of always felt that way about it; I desperately wanted to like it, but never did as much as I thought that I would.

Some of that weird trippy stuff should be evident from the back cover, honestly. As you can see, the sample choices that it shows you on the back talk about being captured by alien beings, flung millions of years into the future through a time warp, or having you witness the creation of the universe. It's unusual that both Montgomery and Packard seemed to be inordinately fascinated with the beginning and the end of the universe; both Space and Beyond and The Cave of Time featured them, and then we get them again here. And I thought flying all the way to the third planet from Altair only to discover that there were very uncompelling aliens there, if you could even meet them at all, and that the whole place was imminently going to be destroyed by a natural disaster wasn't all that cool; in my imagination, going to the third planet from Altair was all about discovering a fantastic and awesome adventurous new world. Maybe I built the book up in my mind to be something that it wasn't ever likely to be able to be, so I was bound to be disappointed in it. 

What's my recommendation to the would be collector? I actually recommend getting it, in spite of my complaints about it. What I'm really complaining about more than anything is that I wanted it to be something that it wasn't ever trying to be (although Bantam were smart enough to make it look sorta like that's what it was going to be) but it's reasonably good at what it actually is; a slightly harder (but still for kids) blue science fiction first contact fantasy. It's also an interesting slice into a fairly specific time and place and style of science fiction that is significantly different than the genre is today. It echoes a lot of the Campbellian stuffy science fiction stuff (see link above) but written for 10 year olds, and making just a brief nod to the success of neo-space opera in the wake of Star Wars. 

Frankly, even before Star Wars made a bunch of crappy product and turned off the majority of its fanbase, people who weren't nostalgia-baited by it (like I was for many years) had pointed out that it wasn't really all that interesting or even well-made compared to what it was built on; it's biggest success factors were 1) it was visual media with modern (for the time) special effects, when the closest visual media analogs were old Buster Crabbe serials from the 40s and 50s with super cheap special effects, or weird boring acid trip or cynical dark movies like 2001 or Silent Running and 2) it was bringing back a genre that nobody was making stuff in anymore, even though there was a lot of pent-up demand for it, which Lucas and Kurtz recognized. But again, this is more like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than it is like Star Wars.

As I read through the book, I had the following things happen to me:

• crash landed up in the arctic region, and although it's specifically said that I have training and provisions, that I probably am stuck forever.
• I vanished and was absorbed into some alien consciousness from Deneb 5. Twice.
• Pickens and I landed on a cliff, but somehow the rocks were like quicksand, and we sank and died.
• headed back to earth after getting just enough data to recognize that aliens would be waiting for us when we got there. Several times, actually. This was kind of disappointing, because I never met any aliens, and we did very little exploration; we showed up, found something within a very short window, and then went home.
• found aliens, and then the story stopped.
• got picked up by some beach balls on spindly legs in a crystalline Death Star, but they seemed friendly as the story ended.
• grandpa Pickens and I shorted out our ship trying to laser cut our way into a crystal dome, and had to wait, hoping Stanton or Vivaldi came for us, even though we had no way to signal them.
• got eaten by a gigantic brown amoeba under the sea.
• traveled back to earth with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, and wondered if I'd gone forward or backwards in time and what I'd find when I arrived.
• got eaten by an elephant-sized giant rat.
• blew up my ship and died.
• took some touristy pictures with furry aliens and Easter Island heads, but had to hoof it back to earth so I didn't die from some alien germs.
• got stranded hundreds of millions of years in the future, and had to hope to find a new planet to live on.
• just disappeared mysteriously. That was a weird one.
• got blasted into another universe.
• got sucked into a black hole. While Vivaldi was optimistic and theorized that we might travel through it, Pickens threw the cold water of realism on this naïve hope.
• escaped a black hole and went back home, where I was given a medal even though I never even got the planet and failed every single mission parameter that I had. Thanks for the bizarre consolation prize, Packard!
• somehow went to the beginning of time, but turned into a spirit version of myself that was going to be born later when my time came, so... OK, I guess?
• shot a missile at an alien something or other in space, but because my ship was traveling as fast as the missile it blew me up. You'd think someone would have checked on the design for exactly that possibility before my ship had missiles installed...
• Vivaldi and I got killed by some kind of defense mechanism of an alien computer room.
• Pickens and I nearly blew up our ship, and we had to limp crippled back to the third planet, hoping that Stanton and Vivaldi could survive until we got there.
• blew our ship up firing a laser at a crystal dome under the ocean. Hey, waitaminute.... I already did that in Journey Under the Sea!
• got captured by very cartoony looking aliens who want to tell me what to do all the time.
• fled the planet after poking around for a while; or really, while someone else poked around because I didn't volunteer to leave the ship. Pickens and I were lucky to keep our ship from being destroyed and to pick up Stanton and Vivaldi who had all the real fun. We'll come back when some kind of antimatter storm shields are developed. 
• You escaped the cartoony aliens, but Pickens has some kind of emotional metaphysical epiphany about the fact that aliens actually exist.
• I found a weird crystal alien ship, but when I could see that it was about to blast off, I chickened out and left it. Never saw any aliens, but it looks like the ship is heading towards earth.
• Got stranded on an alien ship and procrastinated getting into hypersleep until for some reason I couldn't anymore. Then I was so lonely and bored that I just died.
• Ship ran out of gas and I crashed into the water moon and died.
• me and the whole crew got stranded on Altair. I guess I wasn't really all that good sometimes at preserving the ship for the return voyage...
• after a weird time-slip attack by aliens, I was able to bail out of the time travel stream. Pickens died, Vivaldi and Stanton are stranded on the third planet from Altair, and I'm who knows where in space and time and now with a crippled ship that I was barely able to limp to some primitive planet to live out the rest of my life on.
• found some aliens in cryo-chambers, but then had to leave. Never talked to them.
• somehow traveled to the end of the universe, and made hopeful remarks that maybe I'd see the beginning of the next one instead of it just all stopping.
• found aliens, but they were literally walking out the door before their planet got destroyed. I decided to travel with them instead of my crew back to earth.
• met an alien briefly, but then had to hoof it back to earth. Vivaldi was all talking about the next mission to come back, but Pickens again with his cold water of truth told her that there wouldn't be a third planet of Altair to come back to after the antimatter storms got through with it.
• went into the hibernation chamber with Vivaldi. When we landed, she was super unobservant, talking about making a new life on a new planet, while I'm noticing the crumbled Coca-Cola can on the ground.

Next up are the last two of the Edward Packard run, including Deadwood City which is another early book that actually predates the Bantam series. While I read that when I was a kid, I didn't gravitate to it at the time and never bought it until recently, so we'll see what I think of it now. 

CYOA: #6 Your Code Name Is Jonah by Edward Packard

This was absolutely one of my favorite books in the series as a kid. As the title implies, this is Cold War espionage James Bond spy thriller stuff, and you—as the protagonist—are a special agent, and an adult working for SIG, an organization that Packard seems to have made up. The tone is surprisingly adult as well, including references to specific gun models, helicopter models, some pretty violent moments, and some musing here and there about the morality of patriotism at all cost, or even participating in the espionage business—although luckily not in a shallow hippy type of way. It's deep stuff... even if it only touches on it briefly. As the back cover implies, you may wonder if you can trust your own government to do the right thing, to say nothing of the Soviets. While the Cold War is obviously over, I never felt like having it be a key component of the story made it feel dated. Of course, that might be partly my perspective; having grown up all the way through High School with the Cold War in the backdrop of my life, I just kind of intuitively get it even if circumstances across the world have changed. What has maybe not aged quite as well; or more likely it just always was kind of hoaky to begin with and I only accepted it because I was a little kid, was the idea of chasing down a mysterious new humpback whale song and trying to decode it. The idea that the Americans and the Soviets would make this a brief hotspot in the Cold War to find out... what humpback whales are trying to say? is kinda silly. Packard does give at least a somewhat better explanation than that; the whales go to a secret under-ice cavern that both the Americans and Soviets think would make a great submarine base, but you don't necessarily find that out in every branch. Of course, by having this hinge on whales—and as I mentioned a few reviews or so back, "save the whales!" was definitely what passed for a meme in the pre-internet days of the 80s during my childhood—it introduces a conservationist theme too. This is also handled relatively well; it could have been blunt and Leftist without any nuance; a precursor to the cult-like movement of modern environmentalism. Instead, it isn't—it does recognize the needs of people without dismissing them as irrelevant to the needs of the whales, but searches for a solution that makes everyone happy. For what its worth, in many endings where you aren't killed by KGB agents, or drown in the ocean, the Russians and Americans come together to sign a new treaty where the whales are protected and neither country gets to have a new submarine base smack dab in their habitat. Like I said, the themes and tone, with the exception of the idea of Soviets and Americans fighting over access to whalesong tapes being kind of silly, is surprisingly mature and has aged significantly well as a result. This continues my evaluation and reinforces my conclusion that these early single digit volumes in the series written by Edward Packard in particular are among the most classic titles in the series. Some of the subsequent ones are just as good; like Packard's #14 The Forbidden Castle, or his #16 Survival At Sea, but they also come along with a "been there done that" feel by this time. (Curiously, I feel like Montgomery's classic titles are a bit later in number; his early stuff isn't as good. His first really good one is #13, The Abominable Snowman. Also curiously, for years I had it stuck in my head somehow that Montgomery had written this one, which of course is not correct.) And, of course, by time we start to get to the end of the teens, we start to get some new authors in the stable, like Richard Brightfield and Julius Goodman, who went on to be relatively prolific within the series.

As noted on my snapshot of the cover, the interior artist is—once again—Paul Grainger. In fact, he illustrated all of the books between 1-10, half of the teens, and many of the subsequent volumes as well. He's the most iconic CYOA illustrator, and to me, Paul Grainger illustrations are an important part of the proper "look and feel" of the series... although I recognize that some of the other artists do really good work as well, particularly Ralph Reese. Grainger illustrates the protagonist, as you can see, as an adult man with intense eyes, blond hair, a turtleneck sweater and tweed jacket, and many of the Russian agents are caricaturish thugs and criminals in appearance. There's a lot of interesting "action shots" among the illustrations, and I remember as a kid being particularly interested in finding paths that took me to certain illustrations, like the car falling off a cliff, your protagonist jumping out of an exploding car, the grappling hook snaking up to an attic window, etc. This book has some of Grainger's most exciting work, I think. My copy is a 6th printing from March 1981 and the cover price was $1.50. There are 114 pages, and according to the cover, 27 possible endings. Mine's in pretty good shape, but some of the spines of some of my books (including this one) are faded, and the red is now a pale peachish yellow. There were some printings that changed the trade dress on the spine, and rather than having the big Choose Your Own Adventure banner in a red balloon and a smaller title, they had the title and author in much bigger letters, without the CYOA banner at all. This seems to have only lasted for a brief time, though—my copy of Deadwood City is like that as well as my copy of Mystery of the Maya. My original copy of The Lost Jewels of Nabooti were like that too, but the one I bought to replace my missing original copy is the standard look instead.

We'll see as I do more of these if this still holds out, but for many years I'd say that this is definitely a contender, if not the leading contender, for my favorite book in the series. The serious tone, the action-based choices and the overall intensity of this one make it really quite good. Structurally, Packard hadn't yet settled upon doing the A-story and B-story approach; Jonah feels like there's one story, and you just explore different aspects of it depending on the choices you make, and how successful you are is also contingent upon your choices—but ultimately, there's only one secret of the whalesong, and only one real international outcome that's described. (I take that back; there's at least one detail that can change depending how which branch you're on; the identity of Double-Eye, your KGB rival, can be one of two different people.) You don't, if you make different choices, find out anything different about the whales, for instance. Because there's a single story with many avenues for exploring it, there's a lot of opportunity within the book to make one choice, and after exploring that branch for a bit, finding yourself exploring another branch that you had not chosen after all. This makes the book feel a bit longer, as an individual read-through that doesn't end badly or early might be extended by one of these loops. In fact, for years, I had a "preferred read-through" that I felt really extended it as long as I could hope for and saw some of my favorite illustrations and moments as I went through it, even though it didn't really have the greatest ending; I survived, but then it just kind of stopped with me washed up on a beach, waving to friendly whales, but not having found the whalesong tapes, the missing scientist, the underwater cavern, or otherwise been very successful at my mission. I know that there seem to have been pretty strict limits on pagecount, since all of these books are within a 110-120 or so page limit, but this kind of feels like we just stopped the story rather than finishing it, and I'd have liked to continue on. Some series, including one written by Packard like the Escape From Tenopia books, expanded on this fewer endings and more looping concept to its logical conclusion; they only had only one ending, and the challenge was finding the correct path that will eventually get you there; often with considerable repeat looping, like reading a maze or labyrinth. I'm not suggesting that I wish Your Code Name is Jonah was like this, but I do feel like many of the endings that are really just stops and incompletes would benefit from looping back into another branch that might take you to an actual ending, as opposed to the story just stopping.

One curious thing; there are two typos that I spotted. One of them isn't a big deal; the word computer is missing its first letter. One of them, however, is the page number associated with a choice, and it sends you to page 74 instead of 44 (which is easy enough to figure out if you're exploring all of the branches, because other pages give you the option to go there by making the same decision.) If you don't know that, though, you'll get a very strange and incoherent bad ending, where you're interviewing suspects of a letter theft in the White House and suddenly you're gunned down in a KGB safehouse.

Anyway, as is my style, let's explore the endings that I had while investigating the mystery of the kidnapped whale scientist.

• A Russian agent posing as a British agent gave away my position, and I was stopped from progressing, although unhurt. Mission botched.
• I was in a car wreck and had to recover; I guess I enjoyed some rest while someone else solved the case.
• It turned out that the mission was a test, and I passed it by doing what Obbard, the director, wanted to see me do. The agreement with the Russians happened in the background, and there's no more case to resolve.
• Or... in another ending, I failed the test and was fired.
• I rescued the missing scientist, DuMont, but was shot and killed myself.
• I caught Double-Eye, who was posing as a colleague.
• was killed by Double-eye, who was posing as a colleague.
• I rescued DuMont, took him to the President, and ended up on the news as a hero. Which I'm sure is meant to be a good ending, but seems like it ends my career as a secret agent.
• recovered the whalesong tape from the Russians and broke up the biggest enemy spy ring in the country.
• Got shot and killed when my bluff in the Russian safe house failed. Three separate times, actually.
• escaped a bad situation after rescuing DuMont by swimming away and getting picked up by a lobster boat. But the cold and shock made me sick, and I'm out of the action for weeks.
• me and another scientist tried to hand off a fake whalesong tape to some bad guys and we're shot dead.
• I fired at a bobbing life raft in an attempt to puncture it, but I missed twice. A gunman on the raft made a lucky shot and killed me.
• got run down in the water by a Russian submarine. Curiously, the full-page illustration for this is on the wrong page.
• I went with Obbard to see the President, and convinced him to sign a treaty with the Russians. Yay, me.
• after being kidnapped by Soviet thugs, I was killed for not cooperating.
• quit my job to become a marine biologist. 
• went out to see the whales, had my ship sunk by a Russian sub, but they told me and the Captain that our governments had made a treaty and we'd be returned shortly to America.
• while I was working one angle, the mission was resolved somewhere else and the Soviets and Americans made a treaty around the issue. This happened more than once, and in one, I'm spending two weeks on the beach on an impromptu vacation. I wish that when I met my objectives in my current job I was sent off for two weeks of vacation! Nice perk.
• successfully bluffed my way into the Soviet safehouse, and am credited for breaking up the biggest spy ring in the country. It's unclear if I kept the money that the Soviet agents gave me...
• had several endings where I was stranded out at sea off New England or even the Maritimes. In two of them, whales end up saving me, and in one I even consider quitting my job to work with whales. In another, I drown.

Next up is the classic space exploration adventure The Third Planet From Altair, which was an early favorite of mine, but which I suspect I won't look back on quite as fondly as I did when I was 9-10 years old. #22 Space Patrol is the more iconic space opera title; this one is more of a First Contact mission.

CYOA: #5 The Mystery of Chimney Rock by Edward Packard

We're on #5, and other than the first one, we haven't heard from concept creator Edward Packard yet, but we're about to go on a five book run of titles authored by him: The Mystery of Chimney Rock, a haunted house themed story, Your Code Name is Jonah, a spy themed one, The Third Planet from Altair, a space opera, Deadwood City, a western, and Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? a very classical whodunit style mystery with a house full of suspects. All five of them are considered real classics of the series; among the best. I admit that I hadn't read any of them recently (well, I just read Chimney Rock in preparation for this review), so we'll see if I think they hold up to both my own rose-colored memories and their reputation.

As mentioned, Chimney Rock is a haunted house themed story. In typical CYOA fashion, you're off visiting some extended family, in this case your two cousins Michael and Jane (who are sometimes referred to later as your friends; I suspect Packard forgot) doing things that you shouldn't be doing; in this case, daring each other to explore a spooky old house that's the subject of a bunch of local rumors, gossip and folklore. Chimney Rock has more structure than any of the stories we've read so far in the series; you meet recurring characters in several branches, like Mrs. Bigby, the old lady, or witch, or ghost, or whatever of the house, Lena her maid (who wears a French maid outfit, oo la la, although I expect that was just to signal clearly and bluntly that she was a maid, not that she's meant to be sexy. Sigh. I was too young when I first read this to appreciate the joke anyway. There's also Melissa, Mrs. Bigby's cat, or familiar, or alternate form, or whatever exactly she ends up being, according to your branch. There's Jervis, the unfriendly and menacing caretaker, who isn't necessarily actually as unfriendly as he appears, and in many branches, one of your cousins or the other brings the police along too. Gilliam Prem, the lawyer who dresses more like he's from the 1880s than the 1980s makes an appearance, who is a later recurring character in at least one other book that I remember, too.

The copyright on the book is 1979, but the first printing appears to be January 1980. My copy is a 14th printing from July 1982, and the price on the cover is $1.95, the most expensive so far. The ever wonderful Paul Grainger does the artwork, and the cover claims that there are 36 possible endings. My copy also has a stamp from my dad's book collection, if you remember when people used to stamp the inside covers of their books, and an inscription on the blurb page that says my younger brother gave the book to my sister. Somehow it's in my collection. Whoops! I guess if she ever wants it back, I can pick it up easily enough on Thriftbooks at a reasonable price. In today's money, of course—not for $1.95. Which, let me take just a moment here to comment on; while this is only two years later than my earlier books, the price has increased from $1.50 to $1.95, which is really quite a jump, especially for a 8-10 year old kid.

In many of the later volumes in the series, you end up splitting very early (usually on your first choice) into an A-story and a B-story that kind of both go their own way, often exploring two different facets of the theme of the title. There's a hint of that here; your first choice is either that you go into the house on a dare from our cousin Michael, or if you don't, your cousin Jane does instead, and you end up having to rescue her. However, this isn't quite as distinct an A-story and B-story, because both stories are extremely similar, and there is even the possibility of one leading you into branches of the other and vice versa. As also mentioned above, there is more structure, though—all of the branches offer similar explorations of the same theme. While in, for example, By Balloon to the Sahara, you might end up joining a submarine pirate crew who only hunts whalers, or you might end up dealing with aliens in a flying saucer in the desert, or you might be doing who knows what with desert tribesmen, all of the options here have to do with penetrating the mystery of a single haunted house and its surrounding grounds. While there are obviously many different things you can choose to do, the underlying premise is very similar in all branches. The one thing that does vary somewhat, however, is how true the supernatural rumors actually end up being. You could easily end up being the victim of a witch's curse, or you might end up discovering that Mrs. Bigsby was just an eccentric old lady who left everything in her will to her cat, and potentially you if you end up becoming the cat's new owner. 

While I say haunted house, it's not really a haunted house in the sense that there's ghosts around very often (unless Mrs. Bigby is one, which she might be.) Perhaps because I read it recently, I found that the premise reminded me quite a bit of Lovecraft's story "Rats in the Walls" which is also a ghost story that in most respects really isn't; its a story of interdimensional monsters (like Lovecraft's often are) and witchcraft and creepy animals with atypical behavior. This tighter focus and more consistent structure really is a huge part of why this book is considered one of the real classics. Along with, of course, the unusual theme; there really weren't very many other attempts at anything that even resembled a ghost story in the series, with a focus more on exotic adventure in most. 

The protagonists could be kids, but according to Grainger's illustrations, they look like teenagers of about 15-16 or so, which is probably appropriate given that the popular slasher flicks from the same era usually featured teenagers getting into trouble too. Even though this is way toned down from Friday the 13th or Halloween given that it's a kids book, I have to wonder if they didn't play at least a subtle subconscious influence on the book, or at least its illustrations.

If you're looking at checking out these old books, this is definitely one that I recommend; it's one of the true classics of the genre and series, and considered by many to be among the best in the run. As with many, it's been republished, sometimes under different trade dress, and the alternate title of The Curse of the Haunted Mansion. As always, I recommend getting it from the original Bantam run, with the original title, text, trade dress and artwork. This one has aged into a truly vintage classic.

I have to admit that when I was 10, the idea of exploring a haunted house wasn't as interesting to me as some of the more exotic adventure stories were. If my brother hadn't bought this as for my sister and it ended up in my hands somehow, I doubt I'd have bought it myself in its original run. I'm glad that I do have it, though. Of the five I've read so far in my modern re-read, it's by far been the best one, and I do appreciate ghost stories more than I did relative to space opera as a kid. That said, if you don't mind branching out into some of CYOA's competitor series, Twistaplot #9 Horrors of the Haunted Museum offers a similar theme and is even written by R. L. Stine before he got famous for writing the Goosebumps series, and Which Way Books #1 The Castle of No Return is another one from the same era that I remember reasonably fondly. No doubt there's more. 

Anyway, you get it. I like it, and it's aged on me over time, and I've come to appreciate it more. What are some of the things that happened to me while exploring Chimney Rock?

• I got turned permanently into a mouse. More than once, actually. I was also shrunk to the size of a mouse, and a couple times it's not clear if I became a mouse or just the size of one. At least two of those times, I was eaten by the black cat Melissa.
• I escaped the house, and ended the curse, according to the caretaker, because the old lady died. Not sure that I necessarily was responsible for that, though, although it beats dying by the curse. In true horror story fashion, just surviving reasonably intact is considered a pretty good ending.
• I ended the curse by walking out of the house with the cat, which was actually the old lady transformed into a cat, but since I took her out of the house, she was stuck for good as just a cat.
• I escaped, but poor Lena, the terrified maid, froze in place and dropped dead on the doorstep and didn't make it out with me.
• I got stuck in some kind of Sisyphus curse where I had to pick up pieces of a broken china cat, but there were always more pieces no matter how many I picked up. Amusingly, instead of saying The End like normal, this one says There Is No End.
• We all got out, even Lena, but the old lady was dead. The police called it a heart attack, but Lena knew better.
• I escaped the house, but unknown to me, a black cat as big as a T. rex followed me out.
• The cousins and I escaped, but the policeman that went in after us disappeared.
• In one where I actually didn't go inside, but tried to bust my cousin out from outside the house, Jane escaped out a window by jumping through the glass. The police say that they'd charge us with breaking and entering, but given that it's Chimney Rock, he's just glad we didn't permanently disappear.
• I escaped, and get read the riot act at the police station, but they end up letting me go because they've got bigger problems; my cousin Jane never came out of the house.
• I escaped, and Mrs. Bigley died. I again narrowly escaped prosecution, but given that Mrs. Bigley was supposed to already be dead anyway, I'm not quite sure I follow exactly. I visit again later, and the house has been torn down, but it's supposed to be creepy that the cat was never found (in my experience, if a cat doesn't want to be found in a big wooded estate, it isn't going to be.)
• I fell down the stairs trying to escape the house, and had a permanent scar on my head reminding me of my narrow brush with death.
• Mrs. Bigley was a ghost that wanted to be freed from her own curse. I managed it by shining the sunlight on her.
• Died in a basement cave-in
• Escaped the basement cave-in with Michael, but Jane somehow twisted her ankle, and a policeman told us to scram
• Locked in a closet which, I suppose, must have been airtight, because it only has a few hours of air in it.
• killed a policeman because he thought I was a ghost and died of a heart attack.
• broke out of Chimney Rock through a window, and got stitches and scars to always remind me of Chimney Rock.
• Got out with Jane, but got pneumonia, had to stay at my cousins longer, and would have died if not for antibiotics, I'm told.
• found Mrs. Bigley's husband as a stuffed mouse in a cupboard. Lost Jane.
• jumped out of a second story window and escaped with a broken arm for my trouble.
• escaped through a coal flume
• left, but some ghostly eyes and a voice told me to not even turn around and look again. Amusingly, I was given the option to do so anyway, and got turned to a page that just said Aaauuughthunk, except stretched out down the page.
• fell off the roof trying to escape through an upper window, and the police found my body in the grass later.
• left safely, with the cat who decided to follow me home.
• didn't keep the cat, but realized that if I had, I'd be the new heir of Chimney Rock, which I'm told is worth a quarter million. In 1979-1980, that was pretty darn expensive for a house.
• went home, the cat vanished somewhere and Chimney Rock was torn down and the plot of land to be host to new apartments
• escaped Mrs. Bigley from her bone room where the remains of all her victims are.
• died in the bone room
• Jane and Michael kept Melissa and inherited the quarter million dollar house
• I kept Melissa and inherited the quarter million dollar house

As I said, I didn't always love this one, because when I was 9-10 years old, I was much more interested in the space adventures and stuff like that. This one seemed a little quieter, and for a ghost story, was surprisingly lacking in ghosts. But I'm more mature now than I was 40 some odd years ago, and I appreciate what this one does much more than I did then. This book has actually aged significantly better than Montgomery's Space and Beyond, which I now consider one of the worst of the original run of adventures, even though thematically it seemed to be more up my alley. We'll see as I go through them, how I feel about the rest of this little Packard run I mentioned earlier. Next up is Your Code Name Is Jonah, a spy thriller that I always liked a lot, then Third Planet From Altair, a space exploration story that again I remember quite liking. Then Deadwood City, which as it sounds is a Western. I don't remember being terribly impressed by that one, but that's because it was a Western, which in 1981 or so when I read it would have seemed like an old-fashioned genre that I had little interest in. I've since come to appreciate Westerns considerably more, so I hope to like that one more now too. And finally, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? which is a classic mystery where you solve a murder that takes place in a mansion from among a list of suspects who were all hanging around looking guilty. I mean, almost by the numbers mystery. I remember considering this one kind of a classic too, in part for its unique setting and the exploration of a genre that nobody else explored in any other volume. This batch, volumes 5-9, are really kind of the real core of the series as I remember it; the absolutely most classic. A few of the early teens also qualify, but by the later teens and early twenties, although I was still into them, and some of my favorite volumes will come from that range, the series felt established already, and we all knew what to expect. It was the novelty of the 1-9 or so that I really fell in love with at the right age.