moon_custafer | (no subject)

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.

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It's really hard to find anything out about old Kids' Book series. Literally thousands of new ones come out every year and then vanish after a few years. I was talking once with a guy running a huge warehouse-sized, used bookstore in San Diego that specialised in kids' books. He said that one of the main reasons that people came to his place was to try and dig up copies of some obscure book from their childhood.

The one that haunts me is this one about an elephant (not Barbar) who lives with some pals in a Glorminghast-like castle. They travel around by punching numbers into the control panel of a giant mechanical hand that then throws them into a net at their destination. In the book they are puzzled by two towers labelled, respectively "Treac" and "le vat": which of course eventually turns out to be a giant treacle repository.

Could your book be "Uncle and the Treacle Trouble (1967) is a children's novel written by J. P. Martin, the fourth of his Uncle series of six books. It was illustrated, like the others in the series, by Quentin Blake" (via Wikipedia)? It looks like there was a fully-funded Kickstarter last year for a British omnibus edition...

Edited 2014-03-20 02:49 (UTC)

It looks like there are a number of used copies floating around both under "Odd and Elsewhere and the Secret of the Seven Bright Shiners" and as simply "The Secret of the Seven Bright Shiners" and there are tantalizing appearances of the title mentioned in other books that turn up as less-than-useful snippets of Google Books previews. A bricks-and-mortar library might be able to help.... did you find the list of the other Odd and Elsewhere titles already?

Wikipedia suggests: The Adventures of Odd and Elsewhere (1971)
The Secret Of The Seven Bright Shiners (1972)
Elsewhere and the Gathering of the Clowns (1974)
Odd and the Great Bear (1974)
The Return Of The Great Bear (1975 May) ISBN 978-0-233-96647-2
Odd to the Rescue! (1975)
The Secret Of Tippity Witchit (1975 October) [4]
The Lost Treasure Of Wales (1977)

I'm not surprised they're hard to find; more that there aren't fansites where people discuss them, or at least blog entries other than this one where someone reminisces about them.