Anyway, the boy really likes the Three Investigators. The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot is about how the teens with the junkyard secret base set out to find a missing parrot who only quotes Hamlet, but with a stutter[1], and end up embroiled in the sinister world of European art theft.

So, this book was written in the mid ’60s, and is very clearly of its time in some ways. The last book had some pretty glaring stereotypes, even if they were perpetrated by notional bad guys, and the next book, which I’m already reading, just casually indicated that rich women get involved in charities because they do not have enough housework to keep them busy, which, wow. Some things I’ve lightly edited on the fly as I read, others, i’m not sure where to begin.

All of that to say, this particular book has a Mexican boy named Carlos, and his uncle, usually a flower peddler but most recently a parrot peddler. They are poor immigrants, but it was honestly astounding to see them written so positively given the publication date. Nobody thought any ill of them just for being on this side of the border, and in fact at one point plans are made for the uncle to go home to Mexico to convalesce after an illness, and then probably just come back and resume his flower business, just as though we have more or less open borders and share freely with our neighbors.

It’s hard to remember, and I mean this in both the knowledge gap sense and the emotional gut punch sense, that some things about the past are better than we’d expect today and in fact maybe even better than they are, today.

Anyway, that Rolls Royce is still pretty cool. Also, like with all such series, I’m really loving the strong continuity. They’re kid books, yes, but they’re certainly better than the modern chapter books I’ve been reading to him[2]. Hooray!

[1] “To to to be, or not to to to be. That is the question.” Honestly, the payoff on that line was pretty good and has stuck with me all this time, even if almost none of the rest of the book had.
[2] I’m not not reading them to the girl, but she is not nearly as patient to sit and be read to as he was at the same age, and certainly she’s not taking much in right now, as pertains to the plot and its twists and turns.