A Long Tradition
“Let’s Haunt a House” by Manly Wade Wellman is an interesting middle stop in a line that runs to this day. Boys’ mystery series date back to the origins of the dime novels but the king of the pile is without doubt, the Hardy Boys. The series is owned by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, that also produced Nancy Drew, The Bobsey Twins and others. The first ten Hardy Boys’ adventures were written by a Canadian author, Leslie McFarlane. (For the first book, The Tower Treasure, McFarlane received $85. That book has made more than two million over the decades.) McFarlane was a Pulp writer of Northern adventures and set many of the Hardy Boys books in woods or out camping.
Manly Wade Wellman never worked for the Syndicate, preferring to create his own series for Boys’ Life Magazine. Later the stories about the Sleuth Scouts would be collected in The Sleuth Patrol (1947). Among those tales is one of ghostbreaking. It’s a natural. Many of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew volumes have false monsters in them. (For example, the latest Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019) features a haunted house mystery.) Wellman’s ghostbreaking tale is “Let’s Haunt a House” (Boys’ Life, October 1947) that was reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock’s Haunted Houseful (1961).
Let’s Haunt a House
The plot has the scouts of Troop Fifteen out camping in the woods. “Sherlock” Hamilton is the leader of Wolf Patrol. (Like Donald J. Sobol’s Encyclopedia Brown later, Sherlock’s dad is the local police chief. He is currently busy chasing a gang of car thieves.) Sherlock’s sidekick and assistant patrol leader is Doc Watson. Max Hinkel makes the third of their group. The plan is to visit a haunted house that lies near their camp. The scout leaders, that include Sergeant Palmer who works for Sherlock’s dad, keep the boys away because they don’t want any nightmares. But that night Sherlock and his pals plan to sneak down into the hollow.
Sherlock dares Max Hinkel to enter “Creep Castle” as he dubs it, after dark. Max takes the bet. Sherlock plans to get there first and scare the other boy. Max enters the house, sees a ghost in a sheet and calls Sherlock out. Only Sherlock appears at his elbow. Max is no dummy. The pudgy outline through the sheet clearly is that of Doc Watson. The joke seems all but over when Sherlock asks “Then what’s on the stairs with Doc?”
The Mask Comes Off
The boys run from the house screaming. All except Sherlock. He fades into the shadows and quickly learns there are others in the building. When they leave he finds a basement in which car parts are stored. He has found the chop shop of the thieves his dad is pursuing. They have stolen the scoutmaster’s car and cut it up. When he knocks over some tires, the bad guys come with guns drawn. Sherlock uses a trick he learned about from the William Gillette Sherlock play. He leaves a flashlight as a distraction. The crooks shoot it while he escapes behind them. He gets outside and runs until he meets Doc and Sergeant Palmer. The policeman, with Sherlock’s help, tricks the armed crooks into thinking they are surrounded.
Several Pulp writers appeared in Boys’ Life along with Manly Wade Wellman. These included Hugh B. Cave, Robert A. Heinlein and Wally West. The magazine paid well for those who could follow its format.
The Three Investigators
My biggest reaction to this story, besides unadulterated nostalgia (oh, those were simpler times!) is that the cast and set-up must have been the template for The Three Investigators. This was a later series of Hardy Boys style books largely written by Robert Arthur (though, like the anthologies, accredited to Alfred Hitchcock). They were published by Random House from 1964 to 1987. The series has similar characters, the lead being “Jupiter” Jones, who has a weird humming/thinking noise like Doc Savage. He reminds me of Sherlock Hamilton. The Three Investigators also had a large number of false monster mysteries including The Secret of Terror Castle, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, The Mystery of the Talking Skull, The Secret of Phantom Lake, etc.
Conclusion
The children’s detective genre is a form of Mystery fiction with plenty of ghostbreaker elements. These are almost always ones based in reality with the mask coming off and Principal Dingwell being revealed to be a crook. The cartoon kids of Scooby-Doo certainly did not spring from nothing when Fred Silverman created them in 1969. It’s a long tradition, and Manly Wade Wellman was a link in that chain. He didn’t need to try and make the ghosts real. If he wanted to write about real ghosts and real ghostbreakers he had his John Thunstone series in Weird Tales at this time.
I never read any of these when I was a kid but I now have an interest in them. I read original Nancy Drew (from before the rewrite/abridgement, usually while listening to music from Twin Peaks. I think I will read “Let’s Haunt a House” (got a copy of the Hitchcock book at a library book sale) while listening to a playlist based around the scores to Alien and Species. That ought to set it off in a strange sorta way.