Fayd vs. Encyclopedia Brown, Part 1

I did quite a bit of reading before I was a teenager. I had a tendency to read material aimed at kids, now referred to as "Juvenile Fiction." I was never the type of person to read things that were considered advanced for my age. I didn't read classic stuff, like Charles Dickens or William Shakespeare. I mostly focused on age-appropriate books.

But there was one book series that ALWAYS caused me frustration. It was Donald J. Sobol's "Encyclopedia Brown."

The stories are about a 10-year-old boy named Leroy Brown, who had read and memorized the entire encyclopedia. He was supposedly so smart that he could figure out the solution to any kind of caper that was taking place in his hometown just by listening to people give details about how incidents had played out. Between 1974 and 1977, I probably read the first 13 books in the series. And for the life of me, I could not solve a single one of the mysteries.

This was irritating to me. I figured I was as smart as Encyclopedia Brown. So I was bewildered as to why I couldn't figure any of the stories out. Even worse was that there were a couple of stories in which I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN the solution. One involved a cave drawing showing a man fighting a dinosaur. I KNEW THAT DINOSAURS AND HUMANS DIDN'T EXIST AT THE SAME TIME! HOW DID I BLOW THAT?

I guess the main problem was that the answers were easily accessible at the end of the book. I couldn't wait to read the answer, so I would just turn to the back to get the end of the story. If I had been more patient and taken the time to re-read the story and look for clues, I likely could have solved them on my own. I was able to determine which passages were important, but never could reach that "Aha" moment that I was looking for.

Reading the books kind of provided a level of wish fulfillment for me. I could identify with someone who was very smart, but still had to go to regular school like everyone else. In any other reality, Encyclopedia Brown would have been enrolled in some school for genius kids and he would have already have finished high school. He also never got beat up, even when thwarting the plans of the local bullies. While the books attribute this to the presence of Sally as his bodyguard, you can also bet that the fact that he was the Police Chief's son played a big part.

I stopped reading the books in 1977. At that point, I was two years older than the main character and had no interest in reading about someone who was younger and smarter than me.

But there were a few things that bothered me while reading the stories and the answers. Sometimes, it seemed like the author wasn't playing fair and would be rather ambiguous about the depth of Brown's expertise.

For starters, there was one story that involved a suspect who explained that he was holding some object in his right hand, and while he was running, he put the object in his left pocket. The answer stated that it was impossible for someone to put their right hand into their left pocket while running. (And if you're thinking "Challenge Accepted," the boy in question also had his left arm in a sling. This means that he would have had to reach over his left arm to get into the pocket.) Let's be clear, that is not in any encyclopedia. And I'm surprised we haven't seen that scenario play out on "Mythbusters."

And there were also "set up" situations, in which Encyclopedia would lay out a trap. One involved a character named Algernon. When confronting someone and introducing him as "Al," the bully claims to have never met him. However, he tells someone else his name is Algernon. At the time, I didn't get what happened until I read the solution. Another time, he tried to catch a bully who stole money from kids. The bully would always say that he asked for change and the victim lost his money in the sewer. The set up involved the victim having an amount that would not produce exact change. Again, this was not something in an encyclopedia.

I also recall the contest mysteries that involved cheating. One was an egg-spinning contest in which the cheater was using hard-boiled eggs instead of raw eggs. Later, I would think that since that was an easy way to cheat, why would the organizers allow participants to bring their own eggs? And if they did, why didn't they try to crack open the eggs after the spinning had completed just to make sure they were raw?

And there was another contest that involved drinking terrible-tasting concoctions. In this instance, participants had to drink something that tasted like a "mustard bath." (What, did they combine mustard with soap?) The boy who won every year was seen sucking on an ice cube because of the hot weather. However, Encyclopedia determined that he was cheating by using the ice cube to desensitize his taste buds. Today, I maintain that if there was no rule against consuming ice cubes in the contest, then he wasn't technically cheating. However, I soon discovered that ice cubes don't really freeze your taste buds and I could still taste food that I thought was yucky!

But because I couldn't figure any of this out on my own as a kid, I started wondering lately if I could solve Encyclopedia Brown mysteries today, with 45 years' life experience behind me. I decided to do an experiment. I bought a Kindle book on Amazon to see if I had what it took.

I'll give the results next Friday.