The Moby Trick Affair (The Adventures of the Dodds Corner Irregulars Book 1)

An adventure tale of spies, secret hideouts, World War II, and a couple of kids whose penchant for correspondence courses lands them right in the middle of all the action, during the early part of the war in Cincinnati, Ohio. It's a book about kids, for kids and adults, featuring Sam, the twelve-year-old son of the local haberdasher, and Elisha, the tavernkeeper’s boy, who is eleven. The boys have tried jiu jitsu, pigeon breeding, and taxidermy. Now they want to be detectives. Edward McCorkel runs an insurance company, but he has absolutely no interest in insurance. He’s a self-styled private investigator while his assistant Susan Stienle runs the business. McCorkel learned to be a detective by taking a correspondence course in a comic book when he was a kid, and he gives the boys his old correspondence course. They study the course but are interrupted by an eleven-year-old girl named Carol Grendel (she likes to be called Cat) who storms their formerly secret hideout and demands to be a detective, too. The boys reluctantly accept her, and they set out to be detectives. When they discover that a neighborhood peddler, Mr. Thimbles, has been robbed, they try to find the crooks who attacked him. But as they investigate, they uncover all kinds of nefarious activity involving German spies, an assassin, and a carnation grower who is a cousin of the late cowboy star Tom Mix. The story ends on the river as the spies attempt to blow up a top-secret government project that coincides with an assassination attempt on a high-ranking Army Air Corps general. Both escapades are thwarted, and all the bad guys—including the crooks who assaulted Mr. Thimbles—are captured. The kids are admonished and praised for their detective work, and they promise not to do any more detecting. But they have their fingers crossed behind their backs.