Freddy the Pig

When I spotted the yellowing paperback in the stack of used books for sale, I knew I had to buy it.  It felt like being reunited with an old friend.

A half century ago, there were a couple of regular events that I always looked forward to.  Twice a month, the Fort Worth Library sent its bookmobile west to our little town for a whole Saturday, turning the red dust of an empty lot into a magic portal where I could lose myself in books.  I still rank the invention of the bookmobile as one of the most important in human history, above the invention of penicillin and only slightly below the development of the seed drill.

Note.  Why aren’t there more bookmobiles?  I checked and there are only three in all of New Mexico.  The state’s central planners ignore the Southern end of the state, evidently because we’re the red-haired stepchild of regions as far as our overlords in Santa Fe are concerned.  For the price of what we have spent on never-to-be-used Chinese electric buses or tourist trains to nowhere, the state could operate a fleet of a thousand bookmobiles.  

The second eagerly awaited event was the once a month distribution of the Scholastic Press book catalog at school.  The little 8-page catalog described all the books that could be ordered though the school and bought at modest prices—most selling for 35 and 50 cents each.  My parents would graciously submit to a reasonable amount of begging and could be counted on to purchase a couple of the books, to which I could augment by scrounging through sofa cushions and car seats for loose coins.  If all else failed, I could skip eating lunch, buying only cartons of milk at the state subsidized price of two cents a half-pint, and saving the rest of the lunch money for books.  (Forced to make a choice, I’d still prefer books to lunch.)

About two weeks later, the books would be delivered to school and parceled out to the students.  Over the next week or two, a few of the books would be swapped with my friends for other books, and the favorites read and reread until the cheap pulp paper began to wear out.  Even with access to the beloved bookmobile, I owe a sizeable debt for my early education to the wonderful people at Scholastic Press.  And since Scholastic Press published the Harry Potter series of books, my sons can probably claim the same thing.

All these memories came flooding back to me while I stood there staring at a dogeared copy of Freddy the Detective by Walter R. Brooks.  Using the excuse of buying it for one of my grandchildren, I purchased the book for several times the original cover price of half-a-dollar, and reread the book cover-to-cover that same day, some fifty-eight years after I had read the original.  And tomorrow, I’m going to mail it to my granddaughter.

There is no way of ever being completely sure, but I think this might be the first detective story I ever read.  I obviously enjoyed it, as I am still addicted to reading mystery stories.

Starting in 1927, Brooks wrote twenty-six books about Freddy, a remarkable pig that walked on his hind feet, could talk, read and write, and though a domestic animal on the Bean family farm in upstate New York, still managed to travel extensively and have exotic adventures, usually accompanied by a wide variety of other farm animals.  Over time, Freddy traveled to the North Pole, wrote poetry, became a pilot, and in a volume that mocked the hysteria of the Cold War Space Race, even built a rocket ship.

The books are significant for several reasons:  the author never talked down to his readers, he used a rich vocabulary and humor that are still relevant to address universal themes, and the books were obvious serious influences on later prominent authors.  It is impossible to read any of the books in the series without noticing the similarities between Brook’s books and E.B. White's Charlotte's Web that was written decades later.

The most obvious parallel is with George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Written between November 1943 and February 1944, the book is a satire on the events leading up to the 1917 Russian revolution and the struggle between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin.  In particular, Orwell—himself a socialist—satirizes the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals of the revolution.

In 1939, Brooks released the sixth book in his series, Freddy the Politician, in which the animals of the Bean farm set up a republic and elect a president to lead them.  Through crooked deals and the use of force, the election is overturned and Grover, a woodpecker named after President Grover Cleveland, seizes control of the farm.  Written just before the start of World War II, Brooks is rather obviously satirizing the rise of fascism through legal elections that ultimately turned into brutal dictatorships.

In many ways, Brooks’ book is the better read of the two volumes as it contains humor, and instead of the corrupting forces’ triumph in the end, as in Orwell’s book, Brooks has Freddy victorious, eventually forcing out the evil hummingbirds.  And surprisingly, the Freddy version is longer, more descriptive, and (in my opinion, at least) contains better written dialogue than Orwell’s version.

There is little doubt that Orwell knew of Brook’s series of books, as the series was extremely popular before the war.  Not only were the American books frequently reviewed in the British press but Freddy the Politician was favorably reviewed in the London Times while Orwell resided in London and worked as a writer.  That a London based writer did not follow the literature section of the London Times is highly improbable.

Happily, while some of the books of the series are rather hard to locate today, Amazon has the more popular editions available for the Kindle.  I would suggest you start, as I hope my granddaughter does, with Freddie The Detective.

By the way, Walter R. Brooks had another series featuring a talking animal—one that you are probably more familiar with than Freddy the Pig.  Starting in 1937, Brooks wrote more than two dozen stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Argosy about a slightly alcoholic writer and his talking horse.  When CBS turned these stories into a weekly television show, it was called Mr. Ed.