I stumbled upon this site during an unrelated google search. For some updated stories, click here.
Damn, I wasn’t able to solve.
Great modern day update though.
That was pretty cool, thanks. I think I have just about all of the Encyclopedia brown books at my parents home. I could never solve them and it always used to frustrate me that my father always could.
I did solve this one, it was a bit of a guess though I must admit.
I remember those! I could never solve them, but once I checked the answer, I never forgot it, so the books were boring because I always knew the answer when I was reading them, after that first time.
Oh man… those are insane. I read them all, and now I wish I knew where my Encyclopedia Brown books went to.
Did you know Sally Kimble went on to star in the movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!?
God I loved those books yippee
Did she change her name to Tura Satana?
Bugs Meany was my personal hero when I was a kid.
Oh man, how I loved those books.
I used to read them time and time again…good stuff.
This one is a funny modern version…
The absurdist folks at Modern Humorist have taken a stab at Idaville’s smartest boy detective more than once. Follow him as he solves the mysteries of current events such as the JonBenet murder and the 2000 election.
I flew through those books as a kid. I loved them! It’s funny you mention the books, because I just thought about them recently and haven’t for quite a while before that.
I loved the Encyclopedia Brown books as a kid! Has anyone seen About Schmidt yet? There’s a cute little E.B. reference in it…
Anybody remember a similar series by the same author (Donald J. Sobol) called Two Minute Mysteries? It was essentially a more “grown-up” version of Encyclopedia Brown. Many of the cases were murders, a crime I don’t recall ever happening in the EB books. Also, as befitting the series’ title, each case was only two pages long, with the solution printed upside-down on the second page. The series was a fun read (although if I remember correctly, many of the cases were similar to Encyclopedia Brown cases), with its own set of quirky characters that the hero kept running into.
I could have also sworn that I’ve seen at least one other mystery series not by Donald J. Sobol that followed a similar format (mystery with solution in back of book). Does anybody remember any other EB-like series?
Isaac Asimov put out at least one book called The Union Club Mysteries, which was in the same format as Two Minute Mysteries, with the answers at the back of the book. Out of about 37 mysteries, I was able to solve 1.
Encyclopedia Brown was an addiction when I was in grades 3 - 5. I LOVED those books.
I would have been an avid reader regardless, but those books were paperback crack for me. Scholastic Book Club always got my parents hard-earned dough when there was an EB book in the offing.
In elementary school, I plowed through the entire series of mystery books, which I can’t remember the title of, but was something along the lines of “Alfred Hitchcock presents…” It followed a group of teenagers who lived in a town (I believe called Titusville), who solved mysteries from their headquarters in one of the kid detective’s uncle’s junkyard. They were bright yellow hardcover books, but not as short as EB mysteries. Each case was much longer, IIRC.
These were what I moved on to after I’d outgrown Encyclopedia Brown. Anybody know what the title of the series was?
And if you like the Union Club Mysteries, you’ll also like Asimov’s Black Widowers stories – sort of like Encyclopedia Brown for well-educated grown-ups. Asimov completed five Black Widowers anthologies of a dozen stories each before he died, and there may well have been a few more published elsewhere.
I should mention that Ellery Queen also did several short-short collections, which of course will be out of print.
I must start an Encyclopedia Brown collection one of these days – I adored them when I was a kid!
Forgot to mention – Mr. S was a fan of “Brains Benton,” a predecessor to EB whose stories were full-length books rather than short stories. Does that ring a bell with anyone?
Okay, I just searched Amazon and found the series was titled “The Three Investigators”; they were edited by Hitchcock, beginning in the mid-1960s (though I wasn’t reading them until the mid-1980s). The yellow hardbacks have been replaced by paperbacks now, apparently. And there were at least a dozen in the series. From Amazon:
. Highly recommended for the young’uns, at least from what I remember!