Look Who’s Talking
When asked to revisit an important book from my childhood I initially struggled to pin one singular text. I am a deeply nostalgic person, and revisiting such a crucial aspect of my childhood proved both interesting and challenging. My obsession with my book choice began when I was about seven years old. I was helping my father clean out the shed when we stumbled on some books he had read as a kid. At the time I was a voracious reader and immediately took interest. One in particular stood out to me, and in the years following I grew to love its series, collecting 37 of the 43 released novels. However, my favorite to this day remains that very first book, Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators in The Mystery of the TALKING SKULL by Robert Arthur, as illustrated by Harry Kane.
The novel chronicles how three young boys, Jupiter, Peter, and Bob, come to own the trunk of the recently disappeared magician, the Great Gulliver, as well as the talking skull within it. Spurred by outside attempts to steal the eccentric trunk, the boys resolve to find out what happened to the Great Gulliver and why his trunk is of such import. Using Jupiter’s brains, Peter’s strength, and Bob’s record-keeping skills, they unravel a mystery that would be beyond most adult detectives.
The bond I formed with Jupiter Jones as a child was one of a shared identity. Throughout the novel, Jupiter defines himself by his intellect, and is hard on himself in cases where he feels as though he’s missed a clue that he should have seen. In an essay on The Three Investigators, Alan Pickrell likens Jupiter to an Auguste Dupin or Sherlock Holmes type character, “Rather than being merely intelligent, Jupiter occupies the realm of the intellectual.” Jupiter, in terms of personality, is almost wholly defined by his pursuit of and possession of knowledge. However, the stock that Jupiter places in his intelligence does not simply stand alone, as he does this in opposition to how he views his appearance. Jupiter is often lightly mocked for being chubby and he is not fond of the teasing. What is interesting is the way that Jupiter presents himself when he does not want to be seen as intelligent, “He put on his stupid look, which he sometimes adopted when he wanted adults to think he was just a dumb, pudgy boy.” For Jupiter, perceived imbecility is directly connected to his weight. It’s as if his intellect is a compensation for the way society views him physically, and I think when I was young I felt very much the same for the inverse reason. As a child, I was incredibly short and thin, and felt so much the pinnacle of shrimpiness. I, too, found solace in intellect and Jupiter was my idol.
Exploring The Mystery of the Talking Skull as a book for boys raises questions about the nature of the juvenile detective story as a gendered subgenre overall. Notable titles of the subgenre include The Hardy Boys, The Rover Boys, and Nancy Drew. According to literary scholar Michael Cornelius, Nancy Drew stands as “a forever girl, a feminist figure who at her heights nonetheless embodies the full zenith and potentiality of girlhood.” With this in mind, it’s interesting that my obsession was geared wholly toward the incorrect gender. As a child I was not particularly feminine. I wore tattered jeans, strayed from pink, played with bugs, and was simply a bit odd. It’s not as though I didn’t have access to “feminist figures” such as Nancy Drew; my sister read the books. My interest in The Three Investigators was a definite choice, and one I took incredible pride in. I recall my fascination with the drag element of the narrative, as the Great Gulliver masquerades as women throughout. As Zelda, he explains “The crystal is clouding. The man whose name begins with G is gone. He has vanished from the world of men. He is dead, yet he lives.” Gulliver reveals this clue in a manner that takes him out the male role entirely, rather than place him in multiple genders. This plot device inherently plays with gender, much in the way I did as a child. In fact, there is only one woman in this novel, but back then I did not so much as blink. Even today, it took some serious consideration to realize.
There are also certain freedoms that the Three Investigators are allowed which I found appealing. With no parents, and a busy aunt and uncle, Jupiter is often left unsupervised. The Three Investigators have their headquarters in Jupiter’s uncle’s salvage yard, having piled various amounts of junk over a trailer to conceal it, and have a system of tunnels they use to get inside. They even have moderate mobility, going out on their bicycles, using a limo service they won, or having Hans, a salvage yard worker, drive them around. This kind of liberty is every child’s dream and typifies the adventure aspect of the novel, which appears in the car chase, theft, bank robbery, gang fight, and con game as well. It is impossible to know whether my love of this novel spurred from glee over the overwhelming excitement or the rejection of femininity that I performed in the rest of my life. Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
Funnily, the mystery of the talking skull is not the most prominent mystery in this book by far, with an answer that was very obvious to a child in 2004: a microphone. Still, as my professor pointed out to me, the importance of the talking skull is not necessarily in the method itself, but the idea of the dead talking back. Many of the characters find the notion of a talking skull unnatural, and are disturbed by this link to the dead. Interestingly, Gulliver names the skull Socrates, so it’s not just that the skull can talk, but that it’s associated with an ancient scholar. In talking to Socrates, not only do we talk to the past, but we talk to knowledge itself. However, it seems that this book has been my own talking skull, but now I am the skull and I talk back to myself.
