Forgotten Kids' Books: The Rocket's Shadow - John Blaine

When I was a kid, I read the Hardy Boys books like everybody else, but my favorite series books along those lines, far and away, were the Rick Brant Science-Adventures by John Blaine. One summer many years ago, I picked up the first two of these in a department store in Odessa, Texas, while visiting relatives who lived near there. I read the first one, THE ROCKET’S SHADOW, and met Rick Brant, the sixteen-year-old son of a scientist who lived on an island off the New Jersey coast called Spindrift along with his family and several other scientists. Early on in that book, Rick runs into an ex-Marine who’s several years older named Don Scott (known as Scotty), who gets a job working for the scientists as a pilot. Rick and Scotty become best friends and are soon mixed up in a dangerous situation as some mysterious enemy is trying to sabotage the efforts of the Spindrift group to win a very valuable grant of some sort (I haven’t reread this book in several years and the details are a little fuzzy). What I do remember is that Rick and Scotty go tearing around in an airplane and getting in fights with the bad guys, and I was utterly enthralled. This was my meat.

So I immediately read the second book, THE LOST CITY. It was even better. The whole gang heads for the Himalayas, where they’re going to set up a radar link to bounce signals off the Moon or some such. Naturally, there’s a gang of villains out to stop them. And yep, just as you’d guess from the title, there’s a lost city inhabited by descendants of the Mongols. Yowza. This stuff was crack to my twelve-year-old brain. I couldn’t get enough, and eventually I read the entire series, which ran for twenty-five books. Rick and Scotty got mixed up in all sorts of scientific-themed adventures all over the world, battled spies, saboteurs, and crooks, and generally had themselves a fine old time. So did I, reading them.

A few years ago I came across some of the books in the local library, including THE ROCKET’S SHADOW, so of course I had to reread them. I was a little worried, because sometimes the great loves of our youth aren’t quite so bright and shiny when we encounter them again. The Rick Brant books, though, hold up. Do they ever. While the sense of wonder that gripped me while reading those first two books all those years ago wasn’t there, I think I appreciated even more how well-written they are. Even though they were aimed at the same readership as the Hardy Boys, the Rick Brant books are considerably grittier. Characters actually die occasionally in them. For the most part they take place in more exotic locations, and the plots are more off-beat, too.

At one point I had heard a rumor that Lester Dent, the creator and primary author of the Doc Savage series, also wrote the Rick Brant novels, but that turned out not to be true. The actual author behind the John Blaine pseudonym was Hal Goodwin. But it would be an easy mistake to make, because the Brants are filled with the same sort of scientific gimmicks and two-fisted, globe-trotting adventure as the Doc Savage novels. I don’t know that the Rick Brant series is actually forgotten – there are several websites and at least one Yahoo group devoted to it, and reprints of the books are available – but it’s certainly not very visible in the public consciousness anymore. The books might be a little dated, of course, for young readers today – okay, a lot dated – but I can’t help but think there are still some adventure-craving kids who would enjoy them a great deal.