I am not the type to hold a grudge. I am pretty forgiving and like to live and let live.
But there was an Encyclopedia Brown mystery that still ticks me off 20 years later.
I always liked the series but every now and then they’d have implausible solution or use facts not in the body of the story. In each scenario, it was impossible to solve the mystery.
The one that bugged me was a standard mystery where, as usual, Brown proves that Bugs Meany was the perpetrator of some bad act.
At the scene of the crime, there was a book discovered. Three suspects had all had the book. We were told that they enjoyed different sections of the book.
The story ended with Brown claiming that he knew who the perp was and the reader was asked “Who Was It?”
I had no idea. I was usually pretty good at solving those stories.
When I turned to the solution, it was revealed that Brown fingered Bugs and determined that he had been the one with the book by turning the book upside down and letting the pages fall naturally. Wherever a person has read a book the most will be the place where it will open to.
Pretty clever solution to the mystery, but I felt cheated. The question asked was “Who Was It?” The reader had no way of solving that mystery with facts in the story. If the question had been “How Can Encyclopedia figure out who did it?” I think it would have been a great installment. But it ticked me off and I still hold a grudge over 20 years later. In fact, if I am driving down the road and see a sign for a childhood detective agency, I stop off and burn their headquarters to the ground.
Any things from your childhood literature stuck in your craw to this day?
I read some Encyclopedia Browns (that sort of sounds like a defecation euphemism) and all I remember is one cover had EB on a ladder, but his legs were splayed so he was balanced on the top rung of the ladder entirely on his crotch. I’m not sure my balls had dropped yet by that point, but that cover made me cringe.
There was another one of EB’s stories that got my goat a bit like the one up there. There was some contest where Bugs Meany had a collection of ping pong balls in a vat and he had to pick out a specific one blindfolded (or something like that). EB noticed that there was a thermos that was under the table early and called Bugs on the fact that he kept the ping pong ball cold in the thermos and was able to find it by the temperature of the ball. I never understood how a thermos could get a ping pong ball that cold that one could notice the temperature.
It was just really poorly constructed, much like this post.
So that’s where they got that in that Law & Order episode. Lenny and Ben were in the perp’s empty apartment - they just missed him. Lenny found out where the perp had gone next by taking the perp’s copy of the Yellow Pages that was next to his phone, dropping it on its spine, and having it plop open to whatever service the perp was looking for. I was plenty surprised by the success of THAT, lemme tell you.
I had these really old books called “The Mercer Boys” mysteries. IIRC one was “The Mercer Boys on Ghost Patrol.” I think they pre-dated the Hardy Boys and used to belong to my Dad when he was a kid or something. What I remember most about them is that they usually solved the crime by just happening upon the bad guys in the act. They weren’t very mysterious.
Of course with Encylopedia Brown you always knew who did it because there was a kid named Bugs Meany in town. So you didn’t even have to notice that he was chewing parsley, or trying to look up ‘misle’ in the dictionary, to know the Meany did it. Sad that his parents never defended the family name.
Much worse were Donald J. Sobol’s Two-Minute Mysteries. Each of these were about two pages long (per the title) and with so many of them in one book, the cases on which murder investigations hinged were so ludicrous that I think people confessed out of sheer confusion. Some that I recall were ‘a redhead fashion model wouldn’t dare wear that outfit’, or 'an English professor would never say “scan” where he meant “skim” '.
It helps that these folks confessed under the least bit of pressure, despite being murderers. I can only imagine Dr. Haledjian must have been extremely intimidating.
I remember one involving a missing violin and Bugs Meany saying that he found it in a tree. Bugs said what drew his attention to that particular tree was that he saw a squirrel backing down it. Encyclopedia deduced Bugs was lying because squirrels never back down trees–they always go down headfirst–so Bugs must have put the violin there. Talk about flimsy detective work! Seems to me that a squirrel in reverse, which squirrels never do, would be reason to investigate a tree.
Indeed. One of those stuck with as well. In the story, set in a castle, a party guest stole a diamond by tying it to an arrow and shooting it out a window.
When, standing in front of the group, the sleuth reveals that the diamond is “an arrow flight away!” one of the party guests says “well, let’s get outside and start looking for it!”
The reason the sleuth knew it was THAT guest is because there is a popular saying, which I have ONLY HEARD USED IN THAT STORY, “a narrow flight away”; which means upstairs. Anyone who didn’t fire the arrow would have thought the sleuth said “a narrow flight” instead of “an arrow flight.”
I never understood why the guest didn’t just say he had never heard that expression and thought he meant that it he said arrow.
Pissed me off!
Also, while I was reading the squirrel one (which pissed me off just reading about it!), I thought of another one.
E. Brown was trying to clear a clown who blew up balloons. Something in the plot hinged on a witness seeing the balloons being up in a tree.
EB said that the witness was the crook and he could prove it.
His proof? That the balloons were filled with air and not helium so they couldn’t float. Pretty reasonable right? Except for the fact that Encyclopedia KNEW, and it wasn’t revealed in the story, that there was no wind that day that could have blown them up in the trees!
To be fair, though, there were actually other baddies in town other than Bugs Meany. Every now and then EB would help his dad (police chief) solve some crime simply by reading through the clues written in his notebook.
There was one such case where the solution hinged on the fact that a young baby was playing on the hood of a car and that if the car had been driven 400 miles just before the baby would have been burning his feet. At the moment, it sounds reasonable, but there was something about it that pissed me off that I can’t remember. Anyone remember that one?
I just dug out my copy of Two-Minute Mysteries to look this one up (which was actually another Dr. Haledjian story). It does mention the fact that there was no wind.
I have another collection of short-short mysteries from around 1940 (and no, I’m not gimping my way upstairs on my sore foot to get the title) that has similarly flimsy plots. Some of them are absurd today considering the time frame: “Everyone knows that Pullman berths are made up with the head of the bunk toward the front of the train!” etc.
There are none that really got me angry, but I just felt in general that they were all slightly infuriating.
I to this day remember several solutions. One involved him knowing some “war hero” was a fraud because he allowed the flag to fly at night in the rain, one where he didn’t find cherry pits on the floor of Bugs’ clubhouse, one where he caught the perp by saying “an arrow flight away” instead of “a narrow flight away”…lots of them. My thoughts as a kid were that I could be a great detective too someday if I had better writers.
I should mention that there was one solution that I really liked, it involved Bugs showing off by jumping over a porch. A porch that had been freshly painted, which Bugs wouldn’t have known about unless he was there earlier that day.
I remember one solution stated that it was impossible to put something (a pocket knife I think) into one’s right back pocket with one’s left hand. Bull I says. Its’ impossible to do it crossing over your right arm (I believe the framed kid had his arm in a cast), but its’ child’s play to do it behind one’s back.
I also remember a story in which two crooks, a guy and a girl, cross-dress in order to steal money from a diner (I can’t remember the exact details). EB’s little girl friend solves the case by noting that the guy dressed as a girl is sitting facing away from the door. Ladies are supposed to sit facing the door as a matter of common couresty. Fair enough, and I learned a lesson, but how did she know that crooks knew that. Heck, she even said that the reason EB didn’t know the answer because guys today don’t know their manners.
Hmmm… I don’t know about EB, but that one showed up in a short mystery story in one of the two “Trixie Belden Mystery Quiz” books that were published back in the 80s. I never thought it was a poorly written scenario.
On a hot summer day, the suspect was confronted outside of his/her house about a crime that had just been committed, and declared that they couldn’t have done it because they had just returned from a long car trip. The kid they sat on the hood of the car during this would have complained about the heat of the hood if that were true, but instead was happy and content, therefore the suspect was lying.
This was probably in the Two Minute Mysteries, but it may also have been on a MindTrap card. I can’t remember which it was, but probably Two Minute Mysteries. I do remember it, though, better than any of the Encyclopedia Brown stories.
There’s also another set of books out there called something like You Be The Jury, which is essentially like Two Minute Mysteries but places you in the context of being a juror and gives you pieces of evidence, from which you have to deduce who’s telling the truth and who’s not.
I always liked these from the aspect of being lateral thinking exercises. As detective stories most of them are hogwash.
