The ’60s spy crazy spawned a lot of things, good and bad. We had a lot of spy novels, movies, and TV shows that came out of it. It influenced other things, hence getting a novel series from Belmont and a comic-book series from Archie that made The Shadow more a spy, and a new Nick Carter series that was more a counterspy character than detective.
The juvenile book series mainly had spies and foreign agents as opponents that their heroes had to deal with. But there was one where the heroes were actual spies: Christopher Cool and his fellow teenage agents of T.E.E.N.
Created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate and published by Grosset & Dunlap, the series ran six volumes from 1967 to ’69. The series ended when I was too young to read it, and I only later discovered it through websites dedicated to various juvenile series.
Credited to “Jack Lancer,” the series was really written by Jim Lawrence who had written the bulk of the Tom Swift Jr. series and would go on to write the long-running James Bond comic-strip series in the U.K. for a period of time.
The series consists of:
- X Marks the Spy (1967)
- Mission: Moonfire (1967)
- Department of Danger (1967)
- Ace of Shadows (1967)
- Heads You Lose (1968)
- Trial by Fury (1969)
The series had Chris and a group of other teen spies working for T.E.E.N. (Top-Secret Educational Espionage Network), headed by “Q.” All were in college, and traveled oversees on their missions (London, France, Turkey, etc). Their main opponent was TOAD. (possible nod to U.N.C.L.E.’s opponent Thrush?), an international criminal group. Not sure if they explained what the name stood for.
The main characters are Chris and his roommate and partner Geronimo Johnson, an Apache Indian. They were sophomores at fictional Ivy League Kingston College. Other T.E.E.N. agents who showed up in the series, only for short appearances, included Spice Carter, a student at Vassar University; Yummi Toyama, a Japanese-American student at Berklee College of Music; and Beauregard Tatum, an African-American student at Harvard. It’s interesting the main characters went to a fictional college, but the secondary characters went to real ones.
As as typical of spyfi, we have gadgets, like a pen that shoots anesthetic darts, earrings that shoot dazzling lights, etc.
The one volume I read was pretty good. Yes, there was an element of the fantastic in their opponents and such, but this was the same level you saw in James Bond or The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Am still working to complete my set, but if you like spyfi, check out this one.
