Sleuthing in style

Our minds have a habit of raking up old memories to relive the past. Mine took me back to the early 1980s, when, as students, the City Central Library (CCL) played a crucial role in forming our reading habits. In our teenage years, we immersed ourselves in mystery books. Unlike today’s buy-and-throw practice, we borrowed the books from libraries that we were members of.

In my circle of friends, boys delved into the Hardy Boys series, and girls preferred Nancy Drew. While my friends’ sisters shared tales of the teenage Nancy, my friends and I explored the amateur sleuth brothers’ adventures and their remarkable ability to solve intriguing plots. Frank and Joe, characters in the Hardy Boys series, would stumble upon clues, like I encountered chillies in dishes, much to my dismay.

Unlike my brother and me, with a seven-plus-year gap in our ages, Frank and Joe were hardly one year apart. Contrary to my situation, I concluded that together they gathered an indomitable spirit and immense strength to support each other and indulge in hair-raising adventures. It didn’t matter to me that the two were fictional characters.

The entire series of Hardy Boys books on the library shelf was a good reason for me to drool. The idea of an engrossing mystery story was a worthwhile compromise compared to reading a dreary social studies textbook, even with school exams just around the corner. Probably the reason why the blood pressure spiked—not for me from reading the novel but for my parents, who had to scuttle my ingenious reading habits!

For a nominal membership fee at the CCL, I could borrow two books at a time. If a Hardy Boys book was missing on the shelf, only then, but rarely, did I substitute it with a Nancy Drew. I either hid it under another Hardy Boys book or wrapped it in a Mandrake comic, for obvious reasons. While Mandrake, Tarzan, Phantom, and others were comic strip characters that were realistically fictional, the Hardy Boys were depicted as human-like, just like us. My true mastery of mystery reading was to outsmart my mother’s watchful eyes, smuggling the book into the house and delving into the racy plot, particularly during exams.

During the day, I placed the story book between textbook pages and pretended to be studious. My mother never caught me reading the next story, as I dreaded the thought of Joe getting caught in the alley.  My night-time adventures were more exciting. As Frank turned on the flashlight to peek into the dark, haunted house—the epicentre of nefarious activities—I smuggled my grandparents flashlight under the blanket, covering myself from head to toe, while a beam of light lit up my book. This also helped keep the mosquitoes at bay.

A gasp of breath was timed as the story unfolded through an extensive, sweaty storyline.

My grandparents never solved their mystery—how did their batteries drain so fast without corresponding to their usage?