Curious Toys

Oh, I loved this book so much. I haven’t been reading as much as I’d like to. A lot of books out there that make the “top” lists are written for the masses, and ultimately many of them bore me and don’t keep my interest for long. This was such a nice respite from the same-old, same old. Wonderful characters. A different perspective. Colorful tale. Well researched. And the story and mystery is absolutely captivating. I LOVE PIN! Thank you for giving a spotlight to queer characters.

This mystery is set in a (fictional) Chicago amusement park in 1915, where girls on the edge of puberty begin disappearing—and then turning up dead. The person who finds the first one is Pin (given her nickname because she was “small and sharp”), only a little past puberty herself and still struggling to figure out just who and what (in gender terms) she is. At the insistence of her mother, who works at the park as a fortuneteller, she dresses as a boy—supposedly for safety reasons, but in some ways she thinks of herself as a boy as well. In trying to find the murderer, she gains the help of an eccentric little man named Henry Darger, who also has strong ideas about protecting little girls and devotes his spare time to writing an endless novel about them, complete with colorful illustrations of their adventures with him. Darger was a real “outsider artist,” the subject of a documentary film (In the Realms of the Unreal) and a number of art books; he lived in poverty and obscurity during his life but became famous when his works were discovered after his death. I saw the movie and was curious to learn more about him. I am also a big fan of Hand’s fantasies, such as Mortal Love, and her mystery series starring photographer Cass Neary, which also have an otherworldly air, and I was curious to see what she would do with Darger as a character. In fact she didn’t do quite as much as I expected. Although Darger is a significant character, he is not (contrary to the implication of Hand’s dedication) the “detective”; Pin handles that. However, Pin herself is both likeable and interestingly complex in her struggle with gender identity, so I enjoyed spending time with her. The story also gives a little look at the silent film industry of the day, since Pin visits the Essanay Studio (also real) and even briefly meets Charlie Chaplin. Somewhat to my surprise, the story proved to be a straight mystery, with no fantasy elements. It was a good one, though, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes Hand’s writing (excellent here, as always), historical mysteries, or stories set in amusement parks and carnivals.

I moved with my parents to Chicagoland, as it's called, when I was a boy; by the time I left a few years later I was a newspaper reporter who'd managed to squeak in at the finale of what they call The Golden Age of newspapering in the Windy City. In CURIOUS TOYS; Elizabeth Hand conjures up an earlier Chicago, specifically of Riverview, the wondrous amusement park where I roamed with pals and sought out dark corners to smooch with girlfriends when I was in high school. In this amazing novel, Hand evokes Riverview in 1915 and finds corners much, much darker than I ever imagined. And those corners are populated by ... well, by monsters! These are human monsters, the sort who prey on children and, in Hand's Riverview, toss their lifeless little bodies into fetid lagoons or abandoned brick kilns. Much of Hand's evocation of Riverview was still familiar to one who spent summer evenings there four decades after the setting of CURIOUS TOYS: the Bobs roller-coaster, the devil above the entrance to a "fun house," the bell that rang whenever a lost child was reported or, in slightly smaller numbers, it seems, found! Negotiating hs way through the crowds and the carnies and the coppers is Pin, a 14-year-old boy who turns out to be a girl! She is a girl who admires brave women and who displays extraordinary courage herself as she and an astounding little man (based on the oddball Chicago fantasy writer and artist Henry Darger, who died in 1973) set out to solve the case of the disappearing young girls and to bring their killer to justice. That's enough about the plot. Hand's writing is almost impossibly lovely at times as she plumbs the minds of Pin, the brave teenager who wishes she were a boy, of the insane Darger, whose fantasy life is detailed in an autobiographical journal of words and drawings and scraps (found after his death, it turns out if you read Wikipedia) and of a Riverview cop, a pederast or two or three, a "Gypsy fortune teller," of some movie actors, including Charlie Chaplin, and of a handful of other characters who make life for young Pin almost impossibly tough and at the same time sweet, sweet beyond words! I couldn't wait to pick this book up every time I set it aside even for a moment. And I'm not ashamed to tell you that as I read the final pages I found my eyes were tearing, whether out of wonderment at Pin's thrilling story or Hand's delicious writing I'm still not sure.

I did not entirely know what to make of this book. The story incorporates some real-life characters, though I have no idea if anything about these individuals was portrayed realistically. The lead character (and some of the others) appear to be portrayed as what we would now call trans-gender, though of course that term did not exist in the time when this novel was set. It kept me reading, but I can't really say I liked the book, and this is going in my "give away" bag rather than "pass along to family."

I loved the authentic feel of 1915 Chicago "amusement parks" and the people and attitudes of the time. Never heard of Henry Father but I will read more about him. He is one of the real people in the book and he is a crazy fascinating genius artist and a writer never published. Other real people who seamlessly enter the book at some point are Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Walter Beery and Ben Hecht. A series of murders of young girls in different areas of the country and unconnected in that simpler technical time, lead the reader down many paths and twists and red herrings until the murderer is the last person you could imagine. Great mystery with the hero a young girl mascarading as a boy