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I RETURNED to the Larry Peters books again and again because the Peters family, Kittiwake Island, Murky Bay, and the ambience of potential adventure were so fecund a ground for the imagination. The adventures themselves became, for me, only the trellises on which each book grew. The stories were there to hold the books together, prop them up, but that function, although useful, perhaps even necessary, wasn’t interesting; it could have been fulfilled by any story, as far as I was concerned, any story at all. The vines that grew on these trellises were much, much more interesting, and part of the interest that I took in them came from the fact that I was partly responsible for making them grow. Certainly the author, Roger Drake, was responsible for planting them and fertilizing the ground they grew in, but it was I who sent tendrils off at unpredictable spots, who sent the vines wandering in several directions, who made them blossom.
I didn’t dislike the adventures, of course, but their attraction faded quickly. They were exciting to read the first time, considerably less exciting the second time, and not particularly exciting at all after that. Exactly the reverse was true of what each book told me about Larry, his home and family, his surroundings, and his friend Rocky King. These were matters that on first reading seemed to be only part of the background for the adventures, and a sketchy background at that, but that became more and more interesting as I read and reread.
The reader was not given much direct information about the personal, the private side of Larry’s life. Now and then, a tantalizing piece of information would pop up in the course of an adventure, but more often there were simply gaps in the narrative that invited one to fill them. For example, in the adventure called Bamboozled, Larry and Rocky and Mr. Peters chase a mysterious prowler across the island, dashing through a labyrinth of bamboo that Larry has planted to baffle such prowlers. During a long and complicated night, the three become separated in the maze and are lost for several hours while the prowler makes his way to the knickknack works, rifles the file cabinet containing the plans for next year’s line of gewgaws, and makes his getaway in the Peterses’ speedboat. When, finally, the boys and Mr. Peters are reunited and realize what has happened, Mr. Peters pounds them on the back, assures them that they did their best, tells them that he’s counting on them to track the prowler down while he and the designers come up with a new line of gewgaws, and then says, “Boys, it will be dawn in another hour or so, and we’ve got quite a day ahead of us. What do you say we get an hour’s sleep, have a swim and a shower, and put away one of your mother’s famous hearty breakfasts?”
That is the end of the chapter. The next chapter opens with Larry and Rocky crouched outside a boathouse, peering through a window at a gang of thugs in the employ of a rival knickknack company. But for me, a great deal happened between the chapters. I had, ever since Mr. Beaker first taught me to read, been in the habit of filling whatever gaps appeared in whatever I was reading. The adventures of Larry Peters seemed to have been written just for someone who had developed this habit, just for me. The books were full of gaps, some small, some big enough to wander in for days at a time. I filled this particular one with a conversation in Larry’s bedroom, a swim, a glimpse of Larry’s sister Lucinda in the shower, a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and sausage, the boys’ good-byes, their running out of gas on the way across Murky Bay, the Coast Guard’s towing them to the town dock, a friend who lent them a jalopy (an amusing fellow who was always trying to get Larry’s sister to go to the movies with him), a dented fender, a flat tire, a Pullman diner, a redheaded waitress with freckles and teary eyes, and much, much more.
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🎧 185: I returned to the . . .