(no subject)

[moon_custafer]

Today I was remembering a book I had as a kid, "Odd and Elsewhere and the Secret of the Seven Bright Shiners." It was pretty obviously part of a series, as the main characters only get an "as you may remember" introduction. The story fell, I suppose, somewhere between Enid Blyton (child-friendly detective adventure) and Paddington Bear (one of our heroes, Odd, is a teddy bear, and no one seems to find it particularly unbelievable that he can move and talk.) I was always a little more puzzled by his confederate, Elsewhere. Elsewhere is a clown, and the few references to the initial book in the series seem to indicate that when Odd first met him he was hanging upside down in a closet in an abandoned house, which unless the tone was more gothic than I recall (my memory says it was gently numinous), suggests he's a toy of some kind, too. When they meet other clowns, though, they all welcome him as one of their own, at least once he gives the correct password: "Grimaldi."

The plot also features, in no particular order: robbers, butterflies, a nice old gay couple, an opera being performed live for tv in the open air, a collection of antique musical instruments, and a retired Welsh cop named Hallelujah Jones.

It is irritatingly hard to find anything detailed about this series on the internet, although the author (Jame Roose-Evans)apparently also wrote the screenplay adaptation for 84 Charing Cross Road.