"Exciting, instructive, and enjoyable." - Children's Book Review
"Intriguing and engaging from start to finish." - Readers' Favorite
For 12-year-old Nelly Melcham, it’s hugely embarrassing to be afraid of flying—especially when your mother is the most famous pilot of 1937. So, when her parents make plans for Nelly to fly to Puerto Rico, it’s impossible to say no.
Trouble begins for Nelly at a stop in a Miami airport where she gets the surprise of her life in the form of a six-inch tall detective from London named Tim Morcombe. Tim tells Nelly he is on his way to New Orleans on a desperate mission to solve the mystery of a woman abducted by ghosts. At Tim’s prodding, Nelly changes plans and, together, they travel to the jazz-infused, racially segregated city of New Orleans to search for the missing woman.
Their only clues to her disappearance? When it rains, her ghost sings sadly from the signpost in front of her house. And a Voodoo priestess has predicted the woman will disappear forever in the next great storm.
"Exciting, instructive, and enjoyable." - Children's Book Review
"Intriguing and engaging from start to finish." - Readers' Favorite
For 12-year-old Nelly Melcham, it’s hugely embarrassing to be afraid of flying—especially when your mother is the most famous pilot of 1937. So, when her parents make plans for Nelly to fly to Puerto Rico, it’s impossible to say no.
Trouble begins for Nelly at a stop in a Miami airport where she gets the surprise of her life in the form of a six-inch tall detective from London named Tim Morcombe. Tim tells Nelly he is on his way to New Orleans on a desperate mission to solve the mystery of a woman abducted by ghosts. At Tim’s prodding, Nelly changes plans and, together, they travel to the jazz-infused, racially segregated city of New Orleans to search for the missing woman.
Their only clues to her disappearance? When it rains, her ghost sings sadly from the signpost in front of her house. And a Voodoo priestess has predicted the woman will disappear forever in the next great storm.
I had to get down that slope in a hurry, a slope so steep and rocky, so wet and slippery, a centipede would have had trouble keeping its footing. The lives of two people were at stake and it was up to me to get to the bottom in time to save them. I suppose that was the stickiest moment in Tim’s “Case of the Crying Signpost.” That, or the night when one of the lives at stake was mine, the night Tim had to fly in a plane without wings.
I’m getting ahead of myself, a thing not easy to do when the story isn’t even begun. I should start by introducing myself. My name is Gwendolyn Morgana Melcham. For some reason, I’ve always been called Nelly, which is OK with me since I never much liked the names, Gwendolyn and Gwen.
My chief companion in life—and the person who has gotten me into the most trouble—is the remarkable, the incredible Tim Morcombe. Now, I’m guessing most of you know little or nothing about Scotland Yard or about its most famous cases, so you’ll be wondering who this Tim Morcombe is. Well, I could fill a large book with the answer to that question but, as the saying goes, a person is as a person does and because this story of mine is going to tell you a lot about what Tim does, I’ll let you decide for yourselves what kind of person he is.
I’ll tell you one thing Tim is not. He is not ordinary. I even met him under the most extraordinary circumstances. The year was 1936 and the world felt much larger back then. Of course, I don’t mean it was physically any larger but there were no trans-oceanic TV broadcasts, no internet, no smart phones, no jet planes and no space satellites. Distant places were harder to reach and information traveled more slowly. I think you get what I’m saying.
Part of my problem was I felt all alone in that great, unfamiliar world of 1936. I was twelve. My mother, Davey Morgan, was a world-famous aviator. In those days, a woman aviator was called an aviatrix, as if there were any difference between a male pilot and a woman who did the same thing.
My father, George Melcham, was a ship’s captain for an ocean shipping company operating out of New York City. With my father constantly away from home on distant seas and my mother always flying, I was mostly left alone in Chicago with my sweet but doddering great aunt, Cecilia Morgan. Two or three times a year, I’d get a visit from one or the other of my parents. I seldom saw them together.
At the end of 1936, I was in seventh grade. School had gotten off to a rocky start, mostly thanks to my teacher, Miss Bayard, who had decided I was lazy. The truth be told, I wasn’t lazy and I didn’t need disciplining but my teacher didn’t see things that way. To her way of thinking, the only cure for my laziness was constant disciplining.
Things had gotten so bad I was seriously considering leaving school after the Christmas break. Then, out of the blue, my Dad wrote inviting me to join him for a month-long vacation in Puerto Rico. He wanted me to take a train to Miami, Florida and catch a boat to the island. He had written to my principal and, somehow, he had gotten her to let me out of school for four weeks.
Believe it or not, this news didn’t exactly thrill me. Although I liked seeing my Dad, it was nearing the middle of the school year and the idea of falling behind in my classes and missing all kinds of school activities felt scary and unpleasant. On top of this, I had never traveled by myself and San Juan, Puerto Rico, seemed a long way to go. As I say, the world felt much larger back then.
In the end, I decided I couldn’t let my Dad down. So, early one morning in the first days of January, 1937, just before sunrise on a gloomy, cold day, my Aunt Cecilia loaded me into a taxi that rumbled to our front door, brown smoke belching from its tailpipe. In less than an hour, I was on a big, black train pulling out of a Chicago railroad station to start its long journey to Miami.
I’ll skip the details of this trip. Being shy around strangers, I kept mostly to myself, speaking only to order meals, sleeping most of the time and willfully ignoring the monumental scenery unfolding outside my train window. When I arrived in Miami, I was supposed to go to the Port of Miami to catch a boat to San Juan but the minute I hopped off the train, a red-faced porter came up and asked if I was Nelly Melcham.
I said, “Yes, sir.”
Nodding, he handed me a note. It was from my mother. In her scrawled handwriting, Davey told me to skip the boat and go to the airport instead. Dad had wired her about my vacation. To save me some time, she had arranged for a friend to fly me to Puerto Rico.
That’s right, fly. It doesn’t seem to be much of a big deal today but, in 1937, flying over the ocean was a very big deal, especially for a girl afraid of heights. Don’t laugh. Even though my mother was a world-famous aviator, this twelve-year-old girl preferred her feet solidly on the ground, not in some flimsy crate bouncing on high winds. For one bleak moment, I was ready to turn right around and head back to Chicago but it was too late for that. I was already a million miles from home.
The red-faced porter helped me find a taxi to the All-American Airport, which was somewhere on the outer edges of Miami. On the way, I kept telling myself surely Davey would only entrust her daughter to the safest, most reliable pilot she knew. Unfortunately, the thought didn’t make me feel any better.
The airport turned out to be a roughshod place with rusted, metal buildings and sod-grass runways. Not the kind of place to inspire confidence. I can still remember walking into the pilot’s lounge, identified by a small sign over the door of a squat hut, my one suitcase in hand, looking for a man named Charlie Hall. Well, I had an easy time finding Charlie, who was drinking his early-morning coffee with a few fellows around a table in the back of the building.
As it turned out, that was the only thing easy about my trip. The only thing to go as planned. Little did I know, I would never make it to Puerto Rico.
You’re not afraid of ghosts, are you?
What’s a city girl from Chicago doing locked in a high tower prison in a creepy old house in 1930s New Orleans? How did she get there, and why? These questions and more swirl throughout Tom Xavier’s utterly absorbing mystery, The Case of the Crying Signpost.
Twelve-year-old Nelly Melcham hates to admit it. But it’s true. She’s afraid of flying, even though her mother is a world-famous aviator. Nelly’s en route to Puerto Rico to visit her dad when her plans take a dramatic U-turn. Nelly winds up in Louisiana with Tim Morcombe, “Indetectable sleuth” and “one of a kind in the Detection Profession.”
Tim and Nelly are soon heading to New Orleans to solve a mysterious missing persons case. It involves the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of one Millicent “Millie” Hastings MacLaren. It soon becomes apparent that evil things are brewing in The Big Easy. It seems the Hastings family built “their prideful home” over the place of the dead. Not a smart move. Now they’re being punished, one by one. Is Millie MacLaren the latest victim? Has Millie been cursed by the ghosts, as “voodoo priestess” Madame Bellio insists, “her body carried away on the winds”?
Nelly and Tim are soon up to their chins in a “wild ghost chase” as they look for clues and try to solve the case and find Mille MacLaren and her brother, Gray Hastings.
When a storm comes up, it’s said that the ghost of Millie MacLaren can be heard crying on the wind. The plot thickens when Tim and Nelly head out to investigate. Nelly soon overhears Madame Bellio utter some strange Cajun words about… ? (Oh, wait. You’ll have to read the book to get that.) But Nelly is discovered. She’s locked in a tower “in a house guarded by ghosts.”
It gets even more interesting in a creepy, shivery, spine-tingly kind of way in this lightning-quick, expertly paced blend of mystery and history. Can Nelly and Tim solve the case and find Millie before it’s too late?
The Case of the Crying Signpost is a little Nancy Drew. A little Tom Thumb. Add a pint-sized Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot and you have a world-class private detective named Tim Morcombe, scene stealer par excellence.
Told in the first person, this finely crafted work is a tour de force of supreme storytelling skill. Strong writing fuels a dynamic plot that has more twists than The Cyclone at Coney Island. It’s masterful. Several “light bulb” moments of the Aha! variety are turned on throughout this gripping read. Meanwhile, the author offers just enough clues to keep you guessing and turning pages. And what’s that about… gold? Tunnels and runaway slaves? There’s also Revenge. Betrayal. Double-crosses. Blackmail. Cousins. (Yes, cousins.) And What’s. That. Awful. Smell?
Middle grade audiences and anyone who loves a riveting story packed with action and adventure will enjoy The Case of the Crying Signpost. I couldn’t put it down!
Finally, books that receive five stars from this reviewer are few and far between. But The Case of the Crying Signpost earns every star. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a mystery/adventure/historical fiction tome as much as I did The Case of the Crying Signpost. It’s a wonderful read. I didn’t want it to end!