What you will particularly like about this book, I believe, is our money-making canal-boat show. We fixed up Dad’s old clay scow swell, with a stage and audience seats and everything. We even had a sort of “orchestra.” Oh, boy! The way that old merry-go-round hand organ gurgled out its tunes when we twisted its tail! And the fun we had!
Scoop was the magician, advertised in the Tutter newspaper as the Great Kermann. Red was the ticket agent. Peg and I were officers of the show company and stage hands.
It was plain to us that we were going to make a wad of money giving black art shows. A million dollars, Scoop said, in fun. Peg said steadily that he would be satisfied with the price of a new bicycle. He got the bicycle, all right. But when you have read this story of fun and money-making and hidden mystery to its exciting final climax, you will say that he earned what he got … all of us, for that matter.
There is a new kind of ghost in this story. The Stricker gang, our enemy, tried jealously to break up our show, but the “friendly ghost” helped us out. Was it a real ghost? Or was it some unknown man playing ghost? We didn’t know.
Buried treasure, a lonely island, alternately cloaked in the blackest darkness and the brightest moonlight, a mysterious piano leg, a crazy-acting, talkative piano tuner—these are a few of the unusual high lights in an adventure story more exciting, I think, than my two earlier books, JERRY TODD AND THE WHISPERING MUMMY (Book No. 1) and JERRY TODD AND THE ROSE-COLORED CAT (Book No. 2); and as mysteriously bewildering as my later books, JERRY TODD AND THE WALTZING HEN (Book No. 4) and JERRY TODD AND THE TALKING FROG (Book No. 5).
Having read this story, treat yourself to some more hilarious fun with the “Whispering Mummy” book, a detective story that probably a million boys have laughed over. Mummy itch! Ever have it? We did.
In my “Rose-colored Cat” book we have our trials with a “feline rest farm”—a sort of sanitarium for wealthy people’s cats. There is oodles of fun and a hundred and fifty crazy cats in this book, and a peculiar mystery of six vanished pink pearls.
In the “Waltzing Hen” book you’ll meet old Cap’n Tinkertop and his hilarious dancing leg. A funny old coot! Why does the hen waltz? What is the secret of the yellow man and the frisky white doorknob? Rip-roaring reading here.
In my “Talking Frog” book we help a boy pal save a peculiar invention of his father’s from thieving hands. What is the shabby old soap peddler searching for, night after night, in the vanished miser’s old mill? What does “ten and ten” mean? You’ll search breathlessly for the answers to these and other riddles if you once get this gripping fun-mystery-adventure book into your hands.
Your friend,
JERRY TODD.