Figuring it out

Dear Annie,

My girls were briefly into Encyclopedia Brown, but some stories were satisfying and others frustrating, requiring arcane knowledge to solve the mystery.  I gave up after reading "The Case of the Hidden Will," in which Encyclopedia Brown exposes the culprit because he knows that only one king in a deck of cards is without a mustache.  (See a funny critique here.)  I prefer the old-fashioned logic-it-out mysteries.

Meg Mackintosh

To that end, I offer two other step-by-step series.  Meg Mackintosh, written by Lucinda Landon,  has been solving mysteries since 1986.  The books are short chapter books -- they run around 40-50 pages apiece.  Every few pages, Meg figures something out, and the reader has the option of doing the same, or turning the page.

In
Meg Mackintosh and the Mystery on Main Street, Meg helps her brother Peter find an old family diamond ring that he lost while running errands. He had put it in his mitten for safekeeping.  During the day, he took some pictures in a toy store (and developed them in a home darkroom -- explainable moment!).  Peter shows the photos to Meg (we see illustration).

"Hmm, every picture tells a story," said Meg.  "I'm not sure how the story turns out.  I do know that you took your mittens off."

    Do you see anything unusual in Peter's photos?

    Why would Peter have taken the mitten off?

[turn page]

"Peter, if you took pictures in the toy store, you probably took your mittens off so you could press the buttons easier," said Meg, as she examined the photos.

She goes on to find a clue or two in the pictures.  The questions at the bottom of the page offer the chance to figure out the answer oneself, or just to get on with the story.  The plots all have a few red herrings to throw the unvigilant off the trail.  Meg carries a notebook with her and keeps careful notes throughout the stories.

The "Get a Clue" series by Julian Press (originally published in Germany) are the same idea, but rely more heavily on illustration.  Every page has a picture -- usually it's full of detail -- and there's a question at the end of each page. In "A Four-Legged Mystery," one of three stories in
The Curse of the Crossbow Archer, three children go into a hair salon in their search for a missing dog.  There's a full-page illustration of the salon.

..."Do you also do dog grooming?" Josh asked awkwardly.

The stylist looked at him stonily.  "No. Animals are strictly forbidden in the salon.  And that goes for your bird -- he needs to wait outside."

"She's charming," David muttered under his breath.  "And what a liar!"

    QUESTION: How does David know the stylist is lying?

[turn page]

  The dog bone on the floor by the back door made David doubt the stylist.  Unless the woman ate dog bones herself, it was a pretty clear indication that she's had a canine visitor recently.  They had to figure out what was behind that door before the stylist became suspicious.

I think of these books as great for the first-to-third grade set who are getting increasingly comfortable reading on their own.  But as you know well, they also work as read-alouds for the mystery-minded soon-to-be-kindergartener.

Love,

Deborah

Young sleuths

Dear Aunt Debbie,

We just read the dramatic department store scene tonight!  I'm interested to see where it goes, and will report back when we finish our first full Nancy Drew mystery.  So far, Eleanor is totally engaged, but there's a lot to explain, starting with what it means to make a will.

I've been thinking about your point about Nancy Drew (and the Hardy Boys, who I've never read -- in my experience, people read one series or the other, but not both) being models of clear deductive reasoning.  I've written before about my love of mysteries, and have pinpointed Nancy Drew as the beginning of that love, or close to it.  But around the same time, perhaps slightly later, I also read a lot of Donald J. Sobel's Encyclopedia Brown.  


The Encyclopedia Brown stories had a very different feel than Nancy Drew.  From what I remember, the stakes were always much lower, and most of the mysteries focused on kids and their interactions with each other.  The stories were short -- ten to a book -- and offered the same kind of teasing, almost-solvable pleasure that Christie's Poirot mysteries played with later.  You could almost figure these things out, and sometimes maybe you could, but most often you'd just get enough so that when Encyclopedia announced the answer you'd feel a little bit smarter.  The feeling wasn't so much following a train of thought as experiencing or observing a moment of insight.


I still remember a number of random facts gathered from the solutions to these mysteries: a hard-boiled egg spins better than a raw one; the word "bookkeeper" has three consecutive sets of repeated letters; you can use peanut butter to remove chewing gum from hair; tears fall from the inner corner of your eyes, not the outer one, because that's where your tear ducts are.  The first three of these solutions had to do with contests: an egg-spinning contest, a contest at a library, a bubble-blowing contest.  Lots of contests in Idaville, apparently.  The fourth had to do with a girl pretending to cry and using eye drops to fake it, but I forget over what.


I don't feel the same visceral love of Encyclopedia Brown as I do of Nancy Drew, but he was a lot of fun to read, and gave me a taste for puzzling that has served me well.


Love, Annie