This is a great thread! I read all the Encyclopedia Browns as a kid, and man, they annoyed the hell outta me.
There was one I still remember where Encyclopedia had to find out who took his friend’s favorite teacup. Of course, Bugs Meany was just hanging around holding the teacup, but claimed that he got from the owner of a local Chinese restaurant that had closed down.
The little factoid that clued Encyclopedia in was that Chinese teacups don’t have handles, and the one that Bugs had did indeed have one. This caused Bugs to quickly confess to pilfering the cup.
But okay, so that might be generally true, but it still pissed me off. It’s perfectly probable that the owner of that particular Chinese restaurant used regular teacups that were more readily available, especially in a small town like Idaville.
Another one I recall that bugged me would be one where Bugs was hiding something he stole in a hot dog he had (I think that was the plot, I can’t quite remember) and Encyclopedia knew he was lying because he put the mustard and ketchup on the sausage in the wrong order (whatever that is- I thought real hot dog fans never even used ketchup, but oh well).
I read a version of that “mystery” that had a slightly smarter author. The sleuth in that version said “an arrow flight” while staring intently at the staircase, which just happened to be abnormally narrow in the house the theft occurred in. I don’t remember which writer or sleuth it was who figured out that readers weren’t buying the “common saying” explanation.
I always thought Donald J. Sobol’s SECRET AGENTS FOUR would have made a decent sixties Disney movie in the tradition of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and Flubber.
For all the vitriol being heaped on Brown at the moment, I did enjoy the ingenuity of some of the solutions even if they were off kilter.
I remember disliking the mystery where Brown fingered the perpetrator because there’s no such thing as a past tense of “misled.” The perpetrator, if memory serves, needed an excuse to go into the garage or something, so he said he was going to look up the past tense of “misled” in the dictionary. Well, if the kid was such a dumbass that he didn’t already know that, then heading to a dictionary would definitely NOT be a sign of criminal intent – it would be a blessed sign that he finally understood how little he knew about English!
I loved the Great Brain stories, too. One of my favorites was how he won the race against the cocky kid with the new quarterhorse–by challenging him to a mile race. And then he turned right around, switched horses, and won the next race, too, by running the quarterhorse a quarter mile at a time and giving him time to rest.
Maybe the REAL secret is that EB knew that his “proofs” were nowhere near airtight, but he also knew that Bugs Meany was a snivelling coward. So all he had to do was come up with something involving orders of condiments, claim that it was an airtight proof, and Bugs, thinking the jig was up, would confess.
And yeah, I remember that thing with the Great Brain and the horses, also. Aside from that, I remember that he smuggled candy into a school, and that non-mormons were called gentiles. After that, I’m fresh out.
Funny thread; I had almost forgotten about good ol’ Encyclopedia Brown and the Great Brain. I must have been a bit of a dull kid, because I remember thinking that the whole “hold the book upside down and see where the pages hang open” trick mentioned in the first post was a pretty cool trick!
There’s a Neil Simon movie called “Murder By Death” that might appeal to anyone who continued reading mysteries into adulthood. A mysterious man (played by Truman Capote) invites a bunch of famous fictional detectives to his house to try to solve a mystery. Lots of jokes aimed at the mystery genre, including mention of the fact that a lot of mysteries DON’T GIVE YOU ENOUGH INFORMATION TO SOLVE THE CRIME!! Hehe.
Incidentally, why are ladies supposed to sit facing the door??
I remember a story that really irritated me. I can’t remember the exact details but I think someone’s dog got kidnapped, and a ransom note was left, and the guy with the broken typewriter was caught because the D key was jammed and there were no Ds in the ransom note! Except it was never mentioned in the story which key was jammed. Or made very clear that there were no Ds in the note.
It wasn’t particularly infuriating but I remember reading two old school Hardy Boys books at the same time and finding out that they had identical plots and only slightly different characters and setting. Damn if that wasn’t confusing.
I read the story alluded to in The Onion piece, in which somebody claimed to have been on a trip, and he claimed to have seen a number of things, all of which turned out to have been impossible, like pigs looking up at an airplane. Reading this, I got my first inkling of the concept of ‘contrivance.’ After that, it became hard to take seriously the idea that anybody would just happen to think to claim to have found a red harmonica in a trashcan under blue party lights.
Also, Encyclopedia Brown’s Book of Weird and Wonderful Facts was full of what I now know to have been myths and urban legends.
When two people are sitting at a table at a side or in a corner of a restaurant, one person will be facing the greater part of the room and one person will be facing the wall or back of the room. The lady should sit facing the room so that other patrons can gaze upon her beauty, rather than her back.
Man, don’t even put the Great Brain books in the same thread with Encyclopedia Brown. I mean, not that I didn’t love EB as a child, but I just picked up the first Great Brain book again and it’s even better than it was when I was a kid!
I’m still pissed about an EB solution that hinged upon the “fact” that you can’t snap your fingers if you’ve been pruning them in a bathtub for a bit. The night I read it I conducted a fingersnapping experiment that blew that Encyclopedia Brown crap right out of the water. You can too snap your fingers if they’ve been in the tub for a while. No problem. They might just be a little squeaky.
As a huge Great Brain fan, I need to stick up for T.D. here:
When Tom threw the boomerang, he held a magnet in his other hand, and used that to “draw” the boomerang back to him.
It was pointed out in the story that Tom had to make several boomerangs before he finally made one that worked.
I love the Great Brain. Like iamthewalrus, my favorite of his capers is probably winning the same race with two different horses. I also loved the one where he “gentles” Chalky the jackass, tells the kids flat-out that he has done it, and they still don’t believe him, bet against him, and lose their shirts.
In keeping with the spirit of the OP, one Great Brain adventure I didn’t like was “The Taming of Britches Dotty.” It annoyed me that Tom’s mother, in particular, took it upon herself to dictate how Dotty should live and act (for those of you who never read it, Dotty was a tomboy who wore jeans and fought like a boy, in a time when that was utterly taboo). I now see how John D. Fitzgerald was showing the strict conformity and busy-bodyness that goes with that kind of small-town life, but at the time I just wish they would’ve let Dotty live how she wanted to.
Nonsuch, Britches Dotty was a little different from your average tomboy. Her mother died, leaving her father raising her not so much as a girl who liked boyish things, but as a boy. What’s more, for better or for worse, it led her to be something of an outcast at school, because neither the boys nor the girls wanted anything to do with her. Surely it was better for her social upbringing to at least show her the way girls were expected to dress and act. If she wanted to reject it afterward, she could return to tomboy-hood, but the Fitzgeralds were definitely doing her a favor by feminizing her.
My favorite Great Brain story had to be at the Academy, when he figured out the Mental Marvel’s trick and got heavy revenge on the upperclassmen who had been bullying him and his classmates.
While he opened the conversation with commentary about magnetizing a stick, and he rubbed a magnet on the stick… his bet was not that the stick was magnetized, but simply that he could throw the stick and it would come back to him.
And he practiced with the boomerang ahead of time until he knew he could throw it well. Tom would never leave something like that to chance.
