CULLEN SKINK AND SIR COSMO DUFF GORDON: Essay by Alex Dawson

What is Cullen Skink? Who is Sir Cosmos Duff Gordon? What do French fry contests and moustache mugs have in common with pirate ghosts and an underground tunnel to Peru? Over a hundred people, children and their parents, thronged The Raconteur Saturday, January 17, the night of The Rapscallion Club pre-release party, to find out. They also came to listen to bagpiper Bobby Clemens blow out the “Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond” (the Rapscallions are Scottish), watch father/son fencers David and Sam Liss (their faces hidden behind bulbous cages) demonstrate a sweeping prise de fer (one Rapscallion, Uncle Edmund, is a champion flunger), and enjoy such South American snacks as chichi morada, juice made from purple corn, and churros, a long fluted donut that gets its name from its shape, which resembles the horns of the Churro sheep.

Prior to the party, I’d sent out a somewhat droll notice saying that due to the slow recovery of a captain stung by a deadly jellyfish known as the Sea Wasp, the refurbished Dutch Fluyt delivering the book, while originally slated to drop anchor five days before Christmas, would not arrive until the morning of the party. The bulletin went on to say that once the Fluyt made port, a steamer trunk containing the books would be freighted from an unspecified Weehawken dock to downtown Metuchen in the rumble seat of a rented 1925 Kissel Gold Bug Speedster. Had any of this been true? I asked the kids, flipping the focus during the Q&A. “No!” they shouted, defiant and resolute. And yet, I reminded them, I’d also publicized a bagpiper, fencers, and a trunk bound in heavy chains and hung with a big black lock the size of a bear trap (which, when opened by contest winner Emma Jaques, poured forth gold light). All these things had happened exactly as advertised. “So,” I pressed, “why so sure about the Sea Wasp?” This seemed to shake their conviction, one boy turned to his friend and said, “He’s got a point.” The friend agreed, admitting that his own father had been “bitten” by a “jello-fish” down at Sandy Hook. Two girls scratched their heads, one stroked her chin.

Though I spent many years in Manhattan writing decidedly grownup plays about the sort of people one typically crosses the street to avoid, I’d always wanted to write a book for young adults. I grew up on a horse ranch in Alabama. Town was five miles away. To go to the movies you had to drive an hour and cross the state line. Our black and white TV got only three staticky stations and the side panel got dangerously hot if it was on for more than an hour. Accordingly, reading (and being read to) was our only regular cultural diversion. Fortunately, my mother had been an English teacher (and, indeed, was a writer herself) and the converted fishing cabin in which we lived had a carefully stocked bookcase that ran the length of the longest uninterrupted wall in the house. Each night after dinner, when Doctor—as we starchily called our stepfather, a former army dentist—would repair to the stables to cauterize fraying horse leads with a lighter, Mom would dramatically declaim some novel from her bookcase. Poised on a low slung fainting couch (one of the few objects that bore her romantic stamp in an otherwise rustic residence full of mounted fish and trophy heads) she’d change her voice for each of Richard Adams’ rabbits in Watership Down, scrape it over gravel for Mrs. Zimmerman, the crotchety witch-next-door with a Prince-like proclivity for all things purple in John Bellairs’ gothic trilogy, or offer a burbling impersonation of the British prime minister in Paladin, a novel about a schoolboy, code name Christopher Robin, personally recruited by Winston Churchill. I rarely see my Mom, who still lives down south, a thousand miles from Metuchen, but I can imagine her reading my brother and me The Rapscallion Club, her voice rich and rotund for paterfamilias Nigel, fast and easy for the pool-playing Uncle Jonathan, and all bottled up in her nose for the persnickety Uncle Edmund.