THE THUMP BLAM, BUMP MYSTERY

There's a real need among urban children for humorous apartment house stories, so how about one in which a little boy on the eighth floor, frightened by a thump above him, drops his toys and scares the little girl below him, and so on down to floor three where another little girl, Erma Jean the narrator, decides to investigate? Fine, if you make anything of the idea, but Armstrong (despite an easy natural rhyme) clumps so unimaginatively from floor to floor, and then back up on the elevator (picking up a child at each level) that recognition gives way to boredom long before the young tenants find, on the ninth and top floor, the mystery's solution: old Mrs. Pettigrew's new, tail thumping kangaroo. A clunker.