Robert Martin

[Anita Bensoussane]

I recently borrowed a copy of Joey of Jasmine Street (Nelson, 1954) by Robert Martin, which I finished last night. Wow - I really enjoyed it and I'm surprised that the author, who wrote numerous books under several pseudonyms, isn't better-known.

Joey of Jasmine Street is about a group of four boys who live in the Covent Garden area of London and keep their eyes peeled for unusual happenings. The descriptions of the district are very accurate, with many streets and locations having their real names (Jasmine Street is a made-up name but may possibly equate to Broad Court, though I'm not certain of that). It's fascinating to consult a map while reading, especially if you're familiar with the place as it is today. I know the main locations pretty well - Covent Garden Market which no longer sells fruit, vegetables and flowers of course; Theatre Royal Drury Lane; the Savoy Hotel; Drury Lane; Southampton Street; Kingsway and various other streets. Since the "Joey books" were written (there are nineteen altogether), most of the warehouses have been converted into flats, bomb sites have been redeveloped and there has been a fair degree of "gentrification" so it's fun to be taken back in time. The story is a reasonably short but exciting mystery akin to something the Secret Seven might investigate, involving shadowing and kidnapping, and I look forward to reading further titles in the series. Detailed illustrations by T. R. Freeman add to the enjoyment.

[John Pickup]

It's a good series, Anita. There are 19 Joey books of which I have 10. He also wrote a Mystery series, I have three of those. The dustwrappers are very colourful.

[Tony Summerfield]

I agree with you on the wrappers, John, all the Joey books have wrappers by T R Freeman who I really like. I had never heard of Robert Martin until a few weeks ago when I was chatting with someone about the Armada website which I had been helping John Allsup with. I knew John for many years but he had never mentioned his Reginald Martin website which listed all his books under the many pseudonyms that he used.

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As the person I was talking to had two Robert Martin collections, he offered to sell me his original collection for a nominal sum and I couldn't resist as they were all in nice wrappers and all first editions - though possibly they were never reprinted. I got 32 books including 18 Joey books (Secret Engine is missing) and five of the ten books in the mystery series - I have since had to buy the first book in this series which wasn't there as I am a fussy gussy who likes to read series in order.

Finding shelf space is proving a bit of a problem!

[John Pickup]

Joey and the Secret Engine and Joey and the Blackbird Gang are proving quite elusive to find. The other seven titles I require I can't find in decent wrappers.
Some of the Mystery series seem to be quite common whereas others I can't find anywhere.
John Allsup's Malcolm Saville website is far superior to the official Witchend one. He also did the ones for Monica Edwards and Robert Martyn as well as the Armada covers one. I met John at a book fair in Harrogate some years ago. I was saddened to hear of his death although it was expected.

[Anita Bensoussane]

It's good to know that you've managed to collect quite a few of the Joey and Mystery titles, John. Needless to say, I'm borrowing the books from Tony (cheers, Tony!) I agree that John Allsup's websites are extremely useful.

[Anita Bensoussane]

I'm still reading the Joey books by Robert Martin and have just started the fourth, Joey and the Blackbird Gang, which begins with a smash-and-grab raid on a jeweller's in a narrow street just off the Strand. There have been exciting elements in all the books so far including visiting Scotland Yard, exploring basements, interpreting messages, hiding in the back of a car and being tied up in a boat which races along the Thames. Joey even takes a car and drives it a short distance himself at one point (he's always been extremely interested in cars and other vehicles, and drivers have often let him sit in the cabs of their lorries in Covent Garden and "move the levers and press the pedals").

In the third book, Joey and the Mail Robbers (1955), there's an interesting passage about the different races that were present in Covent Garden in the 1950s:

This Covent Garden area in which Joey had been brought up is practically in the heart of London itself, and the people who live there have grown used to seeing almost anything happen - from falling bombs to the coronations of kings and queens. Nothing surprises them very much; they know that sooner or later will come all kinds of people, from turbaned Indians to round-faced, dark-eyed Eskimos, all of them looking strangely out of place in Western clothes, but nevertheless thrilled by the city around them.

Joey, like the rest of the people who live there, had come to accept the unusual as part of his daily life. Therefore he didn't talk about other people who looked or spoke and behaved differently. He took it for granted that there were many different kinds of people, and that it was natural they should visit London.

This may seem a long explanation of why Joey didn't immediately tell his father what he had seen that morning [witnessing a crash involving a get-away vehicle linked to a mail robbery - and being pushed over by a man who got out of the vehicle]. The habit of minding one's own business was something he had grown up with and accepted because of the very conditions in which he lived. Almost any day he could see people of different colours and hear different languages or dialects - Australian, American, South African, Greek, Italian, German, French, and many others not always recognisable.

The mention of an air terminal on the South Bank also fascinated me:

Barely ten minutes' walk from the brand new Waterloo Bridge is the great air terminal where strangers from foreign lands disembark from the coaches which bring them from London Airport.

Oh, and there's a reference to "sneakers" which caught my eye because there was recently some discussion in another thread about whether that word was in use in Britain in the 1950s or thereabouts. However, Robert Martin had spent some time living in America (working with cowboys) so that may have been an influence:

Joey was going down the stairs from the flat and moving slowly as he puzzled over where to look next. Although he had told Ben's mother there were other places Ben might be, he had already tried most of them. He made no noise as he descended the stone stairs because he was wearing rubber-soled sneakers.

As well as enjoying the stories and characters, I'm learning a lot about 1950s London!

[Anita Bensoussane]

I've read a couple more Joey books and I'm enjoying them as much as ever. Passages which reveal what life was like in the 1950s are fascinating because I find myself comparing them with what I've learnt from other authors of around that period, particularly Enid Blyton! For example, in Joey and the Helicopter Joey's father (Smitty) comments on the concept of "Finding's keeping" and his view tallies with what we read in Blyton books like The Six Bad Boys or the short story 'The Packet of Sweets':

"But I don't see how you can keep it, and that's a fact, Joey. Findings ain't keepings, and no matter how you find a thing, it's still not yours until it's given to you. Makes you very nearly as bad as those who find things before they're lost. People call them thieves."

When I was at school in the 1970s, children who found something that had been dropped in the playground (e.g. a marble or badge or hairband) would often pounce on it and chant, "Finders keepers, losers weepers!" It left me wondering why real life wasn't more like fiction!

To quote from Joey and the Helicopter again:

"Then slip down to the corner and get me a packet of fags and a paper, will you, please, son?"...

...Leaving the front door on the latch he [Joey] ran down to that most worthy and dependable of businesses - the corner shop. It was owned by a gruff, sharp-tongued person known to everyone living in the area as Old Meg.

"Your dad want me to get locked up, eh?" she snapped when Joey made his request.

"He might," Joey replied cheekily. "Why?"

"Because he ought to know kids can't be served with cigarettes - that's why."

Joey and the Helicopter was published in 1956, yet Enid Blyton has the children buying tobacco for Jeremiah Boogle in Five Go to Demon's Rocks, published in 1961. It would be interesting to know what the law was at that time regarding minors buying tobacco and tobacco products.

Incidentally, when Joey and the Helicopter was written helicopters had just been put into service at the Waterloo Terminal. It's amazing to think that there was a helipad on the South Bank.

There's more about flying in Joey and the Magic Eye, when Joey and his friends Ben and Clapper go to London Airport to see off an American gentleman (Sam) who is travelling back to New York:

The boys were both surprised and intrigued by the formalities which Sam and other passengers for the New York flight had to undergo.

"Coo - fancy all that perishing performance!" Clapper sounded very disgusted. "It's a blinking swindle."

"Why is it a swindle?" Ben asked. "It's Sam who has to have all those papers and passport and luggage checked by the customs - not you."

"I mean, when you read about someone dashing off and taking a plane to New York. Well, they don't do no dashing. Some of the English people have got to have certificates to say they've been injected and declare how much money they've got, and all sorts of silly things. Coo - talk about a free country!"

"M'm." Joey nodded agreement. "Surprises me, too. I thought you just bought a ticket and got on a plane."

I seem to remember thinking the same about air travel when I was a child - that it would simply involve buying a ticket and hopping onto a plane. Stories I read usually made it sound so straightforward and spontaneous, like catching a bus!

[Anita Bensoussane]

The social class aspect is interesting as Joey and his friends are all working-class yet Clapper is sometimes described as "uneducated" compared to the others and doesn't seem to know as much. The following conversation between the children and a taxi driver (Tony) suggests that some of Joey's contemporaries, like Ben, expect their speech to be nearer to Standard English once they're fully grown:

"You mean we can ride around in that crate all day?" Clapper pointed to the big, gleaming hire-car.

"Not so much of the 'crate'", said Tony. "Some of you kids ain't got any appreciation of fine things."

"Have not got," Ben corrected him snootily. "We can say 'ain't' occasionally because we're not grown up, and we're not supposed to be fully educated yet. But I don't like to hear it from grown-up people."

"Oh, you don't, eh?" said Tony fiercely, but his eyes glinted with humour. "Well, I'm not Mr. Samuel J. Balsac - and I ain't got the toleration and understanding, see? If you start telling me where to get off, or what I'm doing wrong, you're liable to get a clip round the ear and one round the seat in the approved, old-fashioned English way."

Joey and the Magic Eye is an absorbing story about how a camera (the "magic eye") helps Joey and his friends solve a crime, with the workings of the camera described in such detail that, if the reader were handed one, s/he would be able to operate it! Sam the American man is a great character and there's an extraordinary scene at the end where one of the crooks, described as "handsome" with "fine eyes, a strongly featured, sunburned face and very white teeth" apologises to Joey, saying, "I have never used violence, but this time I was a party to it, and it was my undoing."

[Debbie]

Joey and the Helicopter was published in 1956, yet Enid Blyton has the children buying tobacco for Jeremiah Boogle in Five Go to Demon's Rocks, published in 1961. It would be interesting to know what the law was at that time regarding minors buying tobacco and tobacco products.

A couple of things on that. Firstly you probably could argue that Julian may have been sixteen by then. That's book 19, in book 21 Anne is I think Games captain, so you could easily say she's the top end of the school then, so Julian aged sixteen is quite reasonable.

Secondly, yes, officially in the 80s there was a age limit on buying. I used to go and buy my grandad's from about aged 8yo, as he was disabled. Yes, the shopkeepers knew him (and me) but I can only remember once when the shopkeeper insisted on coming back with me and handing it directly to him.
EB might not have wanted to give that impression, however it was fairly common to buy it for others and not be questioned.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Ah yes - you're absolutely right that Julian was old enough to buy tobacco, Debbie. I'd forgotten that! I learnt from a forums discussion some time ago that Aunt Fanny says in Five Fall Into Adventure, "Julian is sixteen now and he can cope with anything that turns up." Sadly, in my 1970s paperback edition that has been edited to "Julian is almost grown-up now and he can cope with anything that turns up."

[John Pickup]

I'm a bit like Tony in preferring to read a series in order now. I was wondering, now you've read several of the Joey books, Anita, whether you've noticed that it pays to read them in order. As I only have 10 of the 19 books and the ones I want are proving elusive to find, I would be interested to know.

[Tony Summerfield]

I am desperately trying to keep ahead of Anita, John, and I have got a bit of a gap now as I am on the 9th book Joey and the Squib. I get a bit distracted trying to follow their adventures on maps of London but I am thoroughly enjoying the series. I am in trouble when I get to Joey and the Secret Engine as the only copy I have found in a dw is on the Oxfam site at £30 and it isn't even a great wrapper.

I think it is particularly important with this series to read them in order as the book that I am currently reading refers to an earlier book quite a bit and it is also nice to see the development of the characters as the series progresses.

[Anita Bensoussane]

As Tony says, it's best to read the books in order if you can. If that's not possible, at least try to get hold of the first title (Joey of Jasmine Street) if you don't already have it, and then read the books you've got in the order they were published (even though you'll have gaps). Of the books I've read, each story has been complete in itself. However, there are little details about the main characters, their regular haunts and people in their neighbourhood that build up over the course of the series - and sometimes there are references to previous adventures as Tony mentions. The four main boys don't all feature in every book, though Joey is a permanent fixture, and sometimes an extra character is brought in.

[John Pickup]

Thanks Tony and Anita for your replies.
I haven't got the first or second books in the series which is why I asked. My trouble is I'm a bit fussy about dustwrappers, which is why it's taking me so long to complete the series. I'm always looking for a VG wrapper at the very least and I reckon I'll have to set my sights a lot lower.

[Anita Bensoussane]

Sorry to hear that, John. If I were in your position I'd probably set myself a time limit for finding the first two books in an acceptable condition. If I didn't get hold of them within the set time, I'd just go ahead and read what I'd got. As a child I didn't read the titles in Enid Blyton's series in order. I could still understand each individual story but it would have been more satisfying to start at the beginning and gradually build up a picture of the village of Peterswood in the Find-Outers series, or see certain characters in the Adventure books grow closer over time.

Last night I started Joey and the Square of Gold and met an interesting character in his seventies named Herman, whom Joey and Clapper have got to know. I like the fact that there's a real sense of community in the Joey series.