The title of this series is not especially appropriate for this book from my past that I reread after years, for there is not much suspense, albeit there is a question mark about who might have been defrauding the city – and a touch of macabre in the manner in which a little girl dies. But these are passing events in the story of the hero, a newspaper boy in a big city.

And I fear the book did not thrill me in any other sense either. I recalled enjoying it in the past but this time round I was not so enamoured, one of the few instances of such disappointment.

The book was by a writer I read in adolescence, Gene Stratton Porter, whose name rang a bell when I came across her at Roshanara though I could only remember one of her books that I had read, called Michael O’Halloran. I remembered that it was about a newspaper boy who had to make his way in the world, but nothing else, so I looked forward to rereading it, when I found a copy at Roshanara. But first I read a book by her that I did not know, called Freckles.

That too was about a boy on his own, who turned up at a lumber camp in the limberlost forest, and asked for work, and charmed the owner enough to be given some, though he seemed far too slight to cope. But he proved immensely conscientious, in patrolling the borders of the concession, and soon became a favourite.

Meanwhile he met a girl who was interested in wildlife, and the lady photographer who had brought her out to the limberlost, and they bond over the little nature room he had created. There are high adventures after that when together they foil tree thieves, which provides some suspense, but then when all seems well Freckles, in saving the girl from a falling tree, is injured.

But he rallies in hospital when he understands that the girl reciprocates his love, and she manages to find out who he really is, the descendant of an Irish lord. So all ends well, with him deciding to stay on in America with the owner of the business who has adopted him, rather than go back to Ireland with his uncle.

Heady stuff, but a good read, and not excessively sentimental. Quite otherwise was Michael O’Halloran, which was indeed positively soppy in its descriptions of the hero’s interactions with the little crippled girl whom he rescues when her grandmother dies and keeps in his little room.

There is a dramatic sub-plot, about a rich man whose elegant wife neglected her children, which led to the death of her daughter. When the man finally decides, having found out what happened, to take his children away, it is just after the lady has been converted to a different way of life through what might be termed one of the juvenile leads, a girl engaged to a hard-working investigator of fraud in the accounts of the city.

But needless to say all ends well. The girl’s father had been responsible for missing money, but it was to help a friend and he puts it back before the storm bursts since Mickey persuades his friend the newspaper editor to hold back on the story; Mickey comes across a rural couple who decide to adopt both Mickey and the girl, which he prefers to a life with the juvenile leads in town; and the businessman is convinced of the reality of his wife’s conversion, and takes her back, though to a family where the spoilt boys have been toughened up.

I might have coped with all the coincidences, and the dramatic changes of personality, but the pervasive soppiness of Mickey and his Peaches was exhausting, and I could not quite understand why I had remembered the book fondly.