FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE LOST CITY

 The Lost City by "John Blaine" (Harold L. Goodwin & Peter J. Harkins)  (1947)

Book Two in a series of twenty-four, with the first three written by Goodwin & Harkins, and the remaining twenty-one by Goodwin alone.  This was a boy's series, inaugurated before the young adult genre came into it's own, but it was aimed at a slightly older audience than the typical Grosset & Dunlop juvenile series; it combined science fiction, mystery, and adventure tropes.  The first few books books were termed "Electronic Adventures," then "Science-Adventure Stories," and finally "SCIENCE Adventures."  the first twenty-three books were published from 1947 and 1968, with a previously unpublished book ending the series in 1990.

Under his own name, Goodwin wrote popular science books, many about space exploration.  Goodwin had a strong technological background.  It is interesting to note that The Lost City was published only two years after Arthur C. Clarke first proposed satellite communication via geostationary orbits -- an idea which was modified to provide the scientific background for this book.

Rick Brant is the teenaged sone of Hartson Brant, a world-famous electronics scient who heads the Spindrift Foundation, a group of scientists headquartered on Spindrift Island off the coast of New Jersey.  In addition to being a good athlete and a private pilot, Rick invents various electronic devices.  He often accompanies his father on scientific expeditions.

Rick's best friend is Donald "Scotty" Scott, a boy of his own age, an ex-marine who lied about his age to join in World War II.  Scotty is strong, tough, fiercely loyal, and is enamored with weaponry.  Originally hire as an employee of the Spindrift Foundation, Scotty is now a firm part of the Brant family.

The other member of the brant family are Rick's mother, who serves merely as a placeholder -- over the course of twenty-four books we never learn her first name, and Rick's younger (by one year) sister Barby, a pretty and extremely spunky girl, who appears only briefly in this book.

When we open, Rick is feeling verklempt, he is about go on an expedition with Scotty that will take him from his home and his father for a full year.  They will accompanying noted mathematician Julius Weiss and Hobert Zircon, who is almost as famous an electronics scientist as Hartson Brant, on a journey to a desolate region of Tibet to perform one leg of an important scientific experiment.  the theory is to establish the beginnings of a world-wide communications network by shooting a signal to the moon, which would then beam back to a distant corner of the Earth.  (Clarke's proposal was to one day use artificial satellites for this purpose, but the first artificial satellite would not be launched until ten years into the future, so for the novel's purpose, the moon would have to do.)  As you can imagine, this was a majorly big deal for the time and had the potential to be a game-changer.  The remote regions of Tibet were about as far as one could get from Spindrift Island and an ideal location for Rick's end of the experiment.  The experiment also required a number of uniquely designed and manufactured pieces of  equipment, all of which had been carefully crated for the journey to Tibet.

The first leg of the trip was by freighter to Bombay, where the expedition would wend their way to Tibet.  There appeared to be no logical reason for anyone to want to throw a monkey wrench into the experiment, but several attempts were made to destroy the vital equipment on the voyage to Bombay.  Rick and Scotty managed to catch the saboteur  but all they could learn was that he was paid by a mysterious "Mr. Conway"; why remained a mystery.  Then, the equipment was stolen from the Bombay docks by a vicious gang.. Again, Rick and Scotty manage to recover everything, with the help of a young young beggar named Chahda -- who would soon become a regular character in the series.

The thing to understand is that all the troubles could have been avoided had not Weiss and Zircon -- as brilliant as each is -- not been absolute idiots.  Their every decision sets off warning flags with the reader.  But let's be kind and assume that they are just naive, trusting, and gullible.  Another obvious bad guy, the oleaginous Hendrick Van Groot, supplies Weiss and Zircon with a wrong map for the trek from Bombay to Tibet, and they blithely go on their merry mistaken way.  Speaking of idiots, Rick and Scotty do not show much initiative in the smarts department, either; only Chahda appears to have any common sense, perhaps because the has read only one book in his short life -- The World Book Almanac.

Despite all their travails, our heroes finally cross into Tiber at the half-way point of the book.  And now they are on the road to Lhasa, "the holy city of the Tibetans, where sits the boy ruler...the Dalai Lama."  Their ultimate destination is the city of Tengi-Bu.  But the man they hired to lead their group turns out to be in the pay of Conway, and is  leading them down the false trail from the map provided by Van Groot.  But, fear not campers!  Chahda, who had been left behind at the Bombay railway station, has managed to follow them into Tibet with the correct map.  But our ragged little  group is being followed and watched...by who?  Could it be ancient Mongols, not seen in this area for six hundred years?

Our expedition of four woke up one morning to find that their not-very-trustworthy guide and all the bearers had absconded, along with most of their supplies and animals.  The scientific equipment remained but there was no way to transport it, and the nearest village was a two-week walk way.  Worse, Chahda was among the missing, but Rick felt that he had gone to get help. 

By now the reader is wondering, where the heck is the "Lost City" of the book's title, and what does that have to do with geosynchronic satellite transmissions?

As Rick climbs a cliff to scout the area, Scotty, Weiss, and Zircon are taken captive  by strange warriors from a distant age.  Rick goes through a cave tunnel and emerges at a lost city of ancient Mongols!  Finally! And on page 153, to boot!

Can Rick save his friends and solve the mystery of the lost city?  Will they be able to foil Conway and Van Groot and complete the experiment?  And why were they so determined to stop the experiment?   And who the heck was Conway, anyway? And will loyal Chahda be able to rescue Rick and his friends?  And what was the gift that Barby gave the boys before their journey, telling them not to open it until the Fourth of July?  (Well, the answer to that question is pretty obvious, don't you think?)

The Rick Brant series of scientific adventures was surprisingly popular, and the books are still highly sought after.  But, for reasons I can't understand, they did not transcend beyond the actual series...no spin-offs, and no media media offshoots (although, if you squint real heard, you might believe they influenced the Johnny Quest franchise).  Grosset & Dunlap began transferring the rights to the series to Goodwin in the 1980s.  The Goodwin family is currently working to bring the books back in print.

A personal confession:  Prior to reading this book, I had only read one other Rick Brant adventure, number 15 in the series, The Blue Ghost Mystery (1960).  I was not impressed.  It turns out that the publisher refused to have any supernatural element in the books, and the original novel was modified to reflect that, and I suspect they did a poor job of it, which goes a long to explaining why I did not care for the book.  (They also rejected an entire novel for that reason; The Magic Talisman had elements of ESP in it, and remained unpublished until it was released in 1990 as the final book in the series.)   The Rick Brant series based its science fictional background as close as possible to real science, unlike, say, the many novels in the Tom Swift and Tom Swift Junior series, both of which went far afield in scientific extrapolation.  As flawed as they were, the Rick Brant stories were exciting reading for their time, and their original magic still remains for those wishing to recapture those days.

And, yes, I am planning to read many more entries in the series.  I may carp and bitch, but I can be amazingly enthusiastic and uncritical in my reading.