One of the universals in any elementary-age group of girls I’ve known is the Horse Girl. They’re more rare the more urban your environment, of course, but even in the city, you get girls who are at least obsessed with horses even if they’ve never been near a real one. While my sisters and I used Breyer horses as Barbie mounts, and while I read the Billy and Blaze books and my older sister read Marguerite Henry, we never counted as Horse Girls. I’ve been on a horse maybe twice in my life, and there were more opportunities than that if I’d had different friends. I didn’t even learn exhaustive details about bits of tack. That isn’t why I never read a Trixie Belden book until last week, but it’s definitely one of the things that would’ve kept me from getting into the series if I had.
Thirteen-year-old Trixie Belden is the only girl in a family of four boys. Her younger brother, Bobby, is six at the start of the series, and she’s often tasked with babysitting. Mart is exactly eleven months older than she is, and Brian is two years older than that. In the first book, the older boys are away working as junior counselors, and the house next door has been purchased by a wealthy family. Trixie befriends Honey Wheeler, who is her age. The house on the other side is owned by a hermit who collapses in his driveway before the book starts; he turns out to be the great-uncle of a fifteen-year-old named Jim Frayne, who has run away from an abusive stepfather. By the end of the second book, he’s been freed from the stepfather and adopted by Honey’s parents.
Along with Di Lynch, another rich girl whom Trixie and the others free from problems with a spurious relative, the teens form a group called the Bob-Whites of the Glen. They are the only children in their area, and they spend time together. They ride horses, a lot, and they end up solving mysteries because it’s that sort of book. There’s an extended cast as the series progresses, including the various servants of the Wheeler family, and there’s a certain amount of travel—Arizona and Idaho, for example.
The first six books were by Julie Campbell Tatham. Tatham had previously written several books about a teenage detective named Ginny Gordon, who similarly had too large a supporting cast. She also wrote books 10-16 in the Cherry Ames series and 5-8 in the Vicki Barr Flight Stewardess series, among other things. After six books, the Trixie Belden series was handed over to staff writers of Western Publishing under the name of Kathryn Kenny. A total of 39 books in the series were written by the mid ‘80s. Allegedly, by the ‘70s, Trixie was more popular with some booksellers’ customers than Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, though the books eventually fell out of print for several years.
Probably the most frustrating thing about the books, even beyond the incessant having to look up bits of tack to work out what the hell Trixie and the others are going on about, is that Mart keeps scoffing at Trixie for always thinking something’s up. However, in the handful of books I got to, we never see her be wrong. Di’s putative uncle really is an impostor. The Wheelers’ new chauffeur really is a jewel thief. And this isn’t giving things away, because if Trixie were wrong, what would happen to the plot? And that’s fine; she has to be right for the books. But there isn’t even a throwaway Noodle Incident where she was wrong and got in some kind of trouble for it.
I also find her bickering with Mart to be more frustrating than amusing. I’m not going to say I had a perfect relationship with my siblings, goodness knows, but nobody wants to read that. I don’t want to read that, either. The eleven-month age gap makes me raise my eyebrows a bit; I know it’s possible, but it feels as though it’s there to keep the older Belden siblings close in age instead of making Brian a year older and spacing them better. Bobby’s supposed to be cute but frustrating, and I just find him frustrating. All in all, the word I find myself using over and over is “frustrating.”
Also, the mysteries aren’t. Oh, Nancy Drew seldom had a long list of suspects, it’s true. But the cast list is so packed with Trixie’s friends and relations that there simply isn’t room for more than one suspect. The Gatehouse Mystery in theory has two, but they spend so much time on one and so little on the other that there’s no room for the red herring to actually develop into a believable option. Trixie’s brothers spend two hundred pages telling her she can’t be right about someone, and then she’s right. Not much of a story.
The class issues are also weird. The Beldens technically have a farm, but they don’t really farm. The father works in the bank. The mother does a lot of gardening and things, but no one farms. Meanwhile, the Wheelers have inherited wealth and the parents are constantly off doing things to increase it. Jim is his late great-uncle’s sole heir, and of course he was adopted by the Wheelers and lives on their estate now. The Lynches became rich some time before the series started, and it made Di miserable. We are constantly told that money doesn’t bring happiness, but let’s be real—Trixie’s dream of buying her own horse is only possible because her parents can afford to pay her enough to save up for one, not to mention caring for it afterward.
Mart scoffs at Trixie’s plan to be a detective, but frankly she earns enough in rewards in the handful of books I read that she shouldn’t have to do literally anything else to pay her share of club expenses. Okay, even as a child, I would’ve been infuriated by the books because of all the really obvious clues that everyone misses—it never seemed to occur to them that what they thought was a Sasquatch was really a guy in a suit, for example, even though we set it up with an actual Sasquatch sighting earlier in the book. But when Trixie says something is a clue, what we’re most likely to get is literally any other character telling her she’s obviously wrong. It’s maddening.
The books have aged strangely. The iodine all wounds in the book are painted with, okay. The ‘50s edition makes it clear that the Belden kids get tetanus shots, so that’s nice. Both boys and girls are shown cooking and doing gardening; Trixie is a tomboy who hates cleaning and sewing. Honey, who’s a heck of a Mary Sue, seems at first to have anxiety but deals with it quickly. But the girls start in junior high early on, and they no longer wear pants to school. Everyone wears skirts. Di, who’s apparently intended to resemble Elizabeth Taylor, is explicitly given leads in school plays because she’s pretty, even though she can’t act.
I haven’t read all of them. Not even close. Alas, I’m given to understand one of the ones I’m missing is the one where she discovers a marijuana field, which sounds entertaining. However, the series as a whole isn’t entertaining enough to keep plowing through. Teen detectives can be fun, but Trixie’s not a good example of that. No wonder she’s got far less cultural weight than Nancy Drew.
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