Remembering The 39 Clues
Written By
Danny Sharp
January 23, 2024
Let’s set the scene: four friends gather around a varnished table on a Friday night. Two nerds sit on the couch—one high, the other chronically sober—theorizing about card game deck construction. They are politely blocking out the two sitting on the other side of the table, who are loudly fleeting from topic to topic in search of one that’ll stick. One brings up a literary childhood classic of their approximate late-Millennial generation: The 39 Clues series, and how it was awful because it has so many different authors.
The other loud nerd (me) chimed in, “Oh, I loved that book series!” After a pause, I added fondly, “It was absolutely terrible, yeah.” The sort of tone meant for past passions of when you didn’t know what quality was. When critical thinking skills or later-adopted morality would pull back a few curtains on the fun. I revved up to start reminiscing with him, “Remember how stupid the clues were? My favorite was mace,” but he cut me off. He’d never read it, he just knew it was bad.
I was aghast. Confused. Delighted. One part of me was indignant that someone could just call a book series awful if they’d never even read it, and the other said, “No no, he has an excellent point.” Grinning, I asked him if I could explain why he was right. He agreed, and I pulled up the fan wiki on my phone to supplement my recollections and roasting.
“The only success in consideration (and the only success consistently achieved) was profit and popularity.”
The 39 Clues is an extremely marketable series for kids about 9-14, boosted by the interactive aspect of hiding story details in trading cards and online games. Rick Riordan wrote the first book in 2008, and very few afterwards. The series has a laundry list of authors who were each paid to write a single book at a time. I don’t envy any writer who must make a coherent story from whatever the previous author came up with. The only success in consideration (and the only success consistently achieved) was profit and popularity. It shows in the sweeping range of quality from book to book.
The general plot follows twins Amy and Dan Cahill, who discover that a European alchemist in the 16th century (their direct and distant ancestor) devised an elixir to enhance each of his four children’s natural talents to a superhuman degree. In each book, the twins race against their other family members to hunt down another clue (ingredient), which was hidden by various ancestors who’d inherited the Cahills’ superhuman talent and subsequently became a formative figure in history. With enough time and education to contextualize that premise, I eventually realized that this gallery of authors wrote a certain… cultural bias between the lines. In short, this is the mystery-solving odyssey of how all of human achievement and invention in the past 500 years is thanks to the exceptional genes of 4 white people and the various folks who happened to be related to them. Benjamin Franklin, for instance.
Let’s put a pin in that.
Part of the appeal of The 39 Clues is in the four family branches. Young adult series do especially well if there’s some system of sorting personalities into clear categories, which appeals to a child’s budding sense of self as a tool to explore and define who they’re becoming as a person. The Harry Potter houses are a popular example. The 39 Clues is no exception, as the plot centers on the Cahill family line, composed of four superhuman branches: Smart, Mean, Sporty, and Artistic.
Which category any book’s famous Cahill belongs to is based partly on logic (Einstein is Smart) and mainly on the author’s effort to shove a recognizable name into one of four talents (Al Capone is Artistic). Later it’s revealed there’s a super-secret fifth branch tasked with keeping the other branches in check. I initially called them Normal. The 39 Clues wiki further explains their specialty as peacemakers and humanitarians (over half of all Nobel Prize winners are Madrigals apparently), but usually resort to destruction and murder to get their way. My friend called them America.
Funny he should say that.
There’s a wild amount of American Exceptionalism accidentally baked into the books. Because the authors mostly only focused on figures generally known to 9-14-year-olds, an astonishing number of American celebrities, folkloric figures, and presidents are listed as members of the Cahill family. It feels disproportionate for a 500-year bloodline. Some Cahills include Washington, Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Obama.
Outside of unpacking the implications of a New York Times bestselling series openly making bloodline supremacy cool and trendy, my favorite part of this series is the clues themselves. Keeping in mind that their audience is a bunch of unsuspecting children, the books make it clear that there’s an unspecified and long-lost process you have to mix the ingredients with, which is undoubtedly because most of the clues are completely inedible. I’m tickled pink by weird worldbuilding in which there’s a special recipe to let you benefit from drinking lead. How did that one alchemist get a hold of all these ingredients? How did he convince his Smart daughter to drink uranium? Hush, don’t worry about it.
As an adult telling this story to my friend, I found quite a bit of entertainment from reading through the wiki, looking over the trading cards, and finding out which people this series dared to imply were not only related but part of a secret society of superpowered people all fighting over the recipe to create a perfect human. Very few of my lingering feelings for this series that I loved are of lingering admiration, but I still recognize why I liked these books so much as a kid.
The short episodic nature made it easy to follow, the formula of each book meant you didn’t miss out on too much if you couldn’t find volume 4 on your library shelf, and it was carefully tailored to appeal to the interests and needs of a specific audience. In hindsight, there’s a lot to consider. For instance, what a child is willing to take at face value as plausible, and what kind of ideologies it reinforces. With the main twins as a meager exception to the rule, The 39 Clues has an obvious theme: those with power were born skilled and cultivated their wealth afterward, not the other way around. Moreover, exceptional works and feats are inevitable to the genetics of those who make them.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for any book bans. The common targets for past and ongoing book bans are the kind that led me to recognize these themes for what they are, how to begin scrubbing racism from my worldview, and how to keep it from leaking into the way I treat others. I’m opposed to any system that benefits from making a child feel they were born to be inferior. These books are a cautionary tale of what kind of poison slips in when the point is profit and little else, especially when looking back on some formative childhood classics.
Written by: Danny Sharp
About the Author:
Danny (they/them) is an intern for the editorial team. They love to read, write, and review bad fiction, and they especially love to torture their friends with any gems they find.
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