Who Is Chubby Lewis?

That's the question we were once asked and we didn't have a good answer. Why are the Lewis Barnavelt books sometimes referred to as the "Chubby Lewis" series?

Yeah, it's somewhat of an annoying name that we've seen pop up on more and more websites, case in point. We don't know when it fell into popular use but we get the idea it was long before the rise of the Internet where it's now touted as fact and copied from site to site. True, Lewis is a bit on the heavy side but "Chubby Lewis" sounds sort of humorous and ineffectual.

So we did some digging and the only "official" place we have found the phrase to date is on the reverse of the Yearling paperback edition of The Figure in the Shadows, where the synopsis paragraph begins:

"Chubby Lewis, the timid but dauntless hero...."

Is that is? Did someone seemingly take the introductory text of a paperback release and use it to define a series of books? At the time of the paperback release, of course, no one would have expected the series to still be alive and well all these years later.

Anyone else have any their own theories? Perhaps something instilled by Dial? Perhaps this is from the same people who came up with the phrase "Johnny and the professor" for the Dixon series. That does sound better than our proposal of the "Four-eyed Johnny" series. Now to come up with something from the books that take place in Minnesota.

How about the "Red hat Anthony" series?

Yeah, that oughta win over fans.