by Moe Zilla

Created on: May 30, 2010

Doug Cushman created two "Seymour Sleuth" books, about a giant monkey detective who reminded me of Sydney Greenstreet. But in "Mystery at the Club Sandwich," his detective is an enormous elephant, working in a detective's office like Humphrey Bogart's in The Maltese Falcon. "My name is Nick Trunk..." the elephant says, wearing a necktie around his open-collar white shirt. "People hire me to find things. I do not charge much.

"I work for peanuts."

There's lots of detective-genre jokes scattered throughout the book. When "a beautiful lady" walks into his office, detective Trunk says she looks like trouble.  And then she announces, "My name is Trouble. Maggie Trouble."  But it's also funny that the story is being retold with talking animals. So the femme fatale is actually just a whiskery pussycat who's wearing a feathery boa.

The case is equally ridiculous. (A singer named Lois Gale has lost her marbles - literally, since she kept her six marbles in a bag in her dressing room...) But it's fun to imagine how a child would respond to the story if they'd never seen a detective movie before. Following the same format, the book's story quickly introduces a series of intriguing and mysterious characters, while a plucky detective leads the way through an increasingly complicated story that's told almost entirely with sharp dialogue.

The short, clipped sentences read like Joe Friday's dialogue on Dragnet, though Cushman probably was inspired more by the classic noir detective films. There's a caricature of Humphrey Bogart on the calendar on his wall - and the year of the calendar is 1939. Like a good noir detective, the elephant first haggles about his price. And it starts to look like the femme fatale who hired him is actually the one who's guilty of the crime.

Cushman wrote just two "Seymour Sleuth" books in the 1990s, but it looks like he was still determined to find a way to bring mysteries to the world of children's picture books. I have to say I was surprise by how effective this story was. It has all the classic iconic elements - glamorous people hiring a humble detective to investigate a crime where there's very few clues. (Just an ostrich feather that was left in the singer's dressing room - and a smudge of peanut butter on the door.) At one point he even trades notes with a police officer who's also working the case - a rabbit named Denby. And all the illustrations are drawn in the lush black and white of a silver screen masterpiece.

There's more text than usual for a children's book, but it works as a genuine mystery. There's three suspects, and just like in the "Seymour Sleuth" books, Cushman re-lists all of his clues before revealing the guilty party. There's lots of references to peanut butter - at one point, the elephant eats a delicious peanut butter omelet. Despite the emphasis on the mystery, even the peanut-loving elephant seems to realize that he shouldn't take his story too seriously.

"This was turning into a nutty case..."

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