In 1953 Little, Brown, and company published The Golden Summer by
Daniel Nathan, birth-name of Frederic Dannay, half of Ellery Queen. Dannay
refused to use his celebrity, and this kind of remake of Tom Sawyer had no
success at all.
Many details show that this book is much more than mere childhood
recollections. Above all there is the fact that Dannay published extracts of
his ‘worseseller’ in EQMM three years after its issue, still keeping the secret
about who was really Daniel Nathan: there are some strange changes in these
extracts, which seem quite unneeded, unless Danny’s memory had improved
meanwhile.
The reading of the book after the extracts allowed me to notice a
complete rehandling of the numerical data in The Boy and the Book. Then
I came to study the whole numerical data of the book, first those concerning
money, Danny’s keyword. The whole summer is a succession of tricks to try to
get money, and of awful grieves each time Danny looses a coin of his treasure.
All these monetary operations are carefully noted in Danny’s pocketbook,
all but last one, the benefit of the Lollapaloosa Bi-Plane Company. President
Danny has a great idea to “manufacture” bicycles, one for him, two for his
associates Chad and Sart, and then the Company sells bicycles to the boys
around at the attractive price of 15 cents. The operation is limited in time,
and after 19 customers at .15 Danny makes an auction for the three last
bicycles, and gets .28, .24, and .17.
The story ends with Danny stopped in adding up these numbers when his
mother calls him for dinner. If there is no problem to achieve the operation
and get $3.54, we will not know which share comes to Danny, as there was considerable
wrangling as to the proper ratio of apportionment between a President and his
two Vice-Presidents.
Unless it was another challenge to the reader?
Seeing that the conclusion of the book gives Danny’s total profit for
the golden summer, $4.73, I wondered if it might be the missing clue. I
collected all the other data to try to restore the profit as it would have been
before the last episode and found $3.50. As this episode begins with a bet of 5
cents lost by Danny, its payment being delayed until the sharing of the
benefit, it would mean than Danny’s share of $3.54 is $1.28, each one of his
partners getting $1.13.
Can that make sense? It seems there’s an obvious solution. Danny
couldn’t ask money from his partners for their two bicycles, but then he
succeeded in convincing them they owed him their parts, a third of 15 cents, just
an easy-to-pay nickel for a beautiful bike, actually the fairest deal apart
from an equal sharing. There are several ways to consider the preceding
argumentation and the sharing itself, but the result would always be $1.28 for
Danny, $1.23 after the payment of the bet, and $3.50 + $1.23 = $4.73.
This shows the money data can constitute a deeply planned whole, but
there are other clues. For example the end of last episode shows Danny having
written on his pocket book the last 4 of the benefit $3.54, so the reader has
to complete the adding up with a $3.5(0), which is strikingly the sum he would
find having the curiosity to calculate the profit of all precedent episodes. As
the selling price of The Golden Summer was too $3.50 - it’s a bit more
expensive now -, it may be an intended self-reference, as other details. So the
19 customers at .15 might allude to this summer 1915, as the two pages of the
table of contents dividing the 34 sections of the book in 19 and 15.
And what about the changes in the extracts published in EQMM? The
changes concerning money occur only in one episode, where Danny’s profit
becomes 25 cents instead of 75 cents. To make good this loss of .50, Danny
would have to take $1.78 from the benefit of $3.54, and this can fit with the most
immediate unequal sharing : one half for the President, one quarter for each
associate. As the associates are not as cute with numbers as Danny, the club
uses to realize the sharing by making equal piles of coins, so it is easy to
imagine the scene:
- “Allrite fellas, here’s two equal piles, one for me, one for you. Now
let’s divide your pile in two. Uh! There’s a penny left! ‘kay, I’ll take it not
no make any of you jealous.
Then Danny’s got $1.78 and each partner .88.
Then the two versions fit with two logical sharings, probably the most
logical sharings. It seems very difficult to imagine how this could be by
chance, at least it is an explanation for the two versions.
If I strongly believe Dannay did perform that clever numerical
enterprise, I don’t feel so sure about the purpose of the project. I have
ideas, that could design an extraordinary theory, but it would take a whole
book, as I feel necessary to go deeper in all other Dannay’s work, i.e. Ellery
Queen saga, where I suspect also many tricks.
Now I’ll just give another example of the depth of this book. To pay
attention to money facts made me consider a strange detail of chapter 10. All
the boys play in a cornfield; Mitch looses his pocketbook; the boys search it
through the field, and Danny finds he lost too three cents he had in a side
pocket. The problem is that he endures this cruel loss without asking the boys
around if anyone found them.
This little detail might have something to do with another strange
detail of the first episode, where Danny and his two partners organize a horror
show, asking each customer 3 cents (to be precise 2+1, as the show is in two
parts). The final benefit of the show is 69 cents, but a careful reading
indicates there were 24 customers, who should then have paid 72 cents. I
suspect Danny to have put 3 cents in his pocket before the sharing, those 3
cents he will loose in the field, feeling guilty enough to say nothing.
This hypothesis is supported by a remarkable symmetry between first and
last episodes. Here the sharing is equal, but the bad action suspected makes
that Danny had finally 26 cents against 23 for each partner. In the last
episode we had 128 against 113, and the ratios are very near :
26/23 = 128/113 = 1.13…
The official benefit of first episode is .69, from 23 customers having
paid 3 cents each. We find two this amount of .69, for the 3 bicycles sold by
auction, at the average price of 23 cents.
There are probably 24 paying customers in first episode, and only 22 in
last one, but here the two partners can be seen as paying customers too, to get
another 24.
This pattern of symmetry is completed by the outcomes in both episodes.
We had seen the sharing in last episode was equivalent to a gift of 5 cents to
Danny from each partner, and Danny had to spend too 5 cents in this episode,
for his lost bet. In first episode the extra profit of Danny is 1 cent stolen
to each partner, and this episode begins with Danny spending 1 cent for a lace
of liquorice.
Actually it is the only time in the whole book where Danny spends
willingly a coin of his Own Money. It doesn’t fit at all with what we learn
next about him, but this doubtful cent might have something to do with another
curiosity in last episode, dealing too with one cent.
Shortly, it seems at the beginning of the episode that Danny spent last
evening one cent for a padlock, although it is not clearly said. But it should
imperatively have been reported in the balance of the previous episode, where
another loss could not have been omitted. It looks like Dannay is telling us:
“Yes, it’s a whole fake, but this is to make you clearly understand that I
needed to have this penny spent in first episode which is related to last one.”
All these doubtful cases might make one doubtful too about my analysis,
but these four cases are the only doubtful ones, and their perfect fitting in
pairs seems to me another powerful argument:
- the concealed theft of 3 cents and the untold equal loss;
- the improbably spent cent and the impossible one.
The Golden Summer might be the biggest
problem in deduction plotted by Dannay, but here the challenging reader would
find no classical revelation of the truth in the end.