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Hello, JunWoo Song,

First of all, I had to go and look up Qingdao, and I found you in Shangdong Province of China. Thank you for posting. I’m pleased to hear that my first book in THE 39 CLUES series, “One False Note,” made a hit with you. It’s always good for me to get the impressions of my work from my readers. It keeps me in touch with what you guys like to read. So thank you for the input.

Your questions: 1. Money. You have to assume that they managed to take a lot of money with them, knowing they were going to need food and lodging. Also, Nellie had little jobs here and there along the way, so she was making a little cash for them too, e.g. at the hotel in Vienna.  2. The Kabras are very wealthy, and have spies everywhere.  As to how others are spying on them, you have to read the whole series to understand McIntyre and how he keeps track of everything and everyone. The clues indicate where the action is going to take place, e.g. the place where Mozart was born. 

Great question about how the whole series is planned, and it’s complicated, but I’ll try to answer. THE 39 CLUES is a multi-author series. The planning of the complete story took place before anything was ever written down, all of it by the editorial staff and a writer or two at Scholastic, the publisher. Rick Riordan, the author, was given the beginning of the plot and asked to write the first book. I was given the second book — they then gave me Rick’s book, told me where the story had to go, and I took it from there. In turn, I handed “One False Note” to Peter Lerangis, and he continued the story from there. And so on, all through the series. So we took up where the previous author left off, but the basic story line was laid out for us, and we knew what point we had to write to in order to continue the story.

Does that make sense? It was a fabulous experience, and turned into an amazing series. The other book I wrote for it was #8 in the series. It takes place in China, and is called “The Emperor’s Code.” I hope you’ll read it and enjoy it too.

Thanks again for writing.                                                                 —–Gordon Korman—–