Encyclopedia Brown: The Great Sleuth From My Youth

Encyclopedia Brown Boy Detective

by Donald J. Sobol

Hardcover, 88 pages | purchase

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Donald Sobol, the creator of the beloved character Encyclopedia Brown, died last week of natural causes, his family says. He was 87. The first in the Encyclopedia Brown series book was published in 1963, and the series has never gone out of print. Crime novelist and forensic diagnostician Jonathan Hayes has this appreciation of the fictional character Sobol gave young readers. While other boys got hooked on books about sports legends and race cable car drivers, there was something about Donald Sobol ‘s boy detective Encyclopedia Brown that spoke to me right aside. Leroy Brown was nicknamed Encyclopedia because he was a brilliance — a decent, brainy child who earned the respect of grown-ups by using his brain to crack cases, normally by exposing an incompatibility in a perp ‘s statement. For example in one story, “ The Case of the Happy Nephew, ” 10-year-old Brown merely knew person could n’t have been driving a car when he said, because the hood would still be excessively hot for a baby to be standing on. That the perp was an adult outwitted by a ridicule my senesce was icing on the patty. Encyclopedia ‘s dad was the Idaville, Fla., foreman of police, a dependable man, but an earthbound plodder whose son was the better crimefighter. Of class, a lot of the error with which Encyclopedia deal was n’t serious adequate to warrant Chief Brown ‘s involvement — Encyclopedia devoted much of his time to sorting out the school ‘s bullies, Bugs Meany and his gang of delinquents, the Tigers .

The Tigers would have loved to beat the pitch out of Encyclopedia, but his best acquaintance and adjunct, Sally Kimball, was tougher than they were. That one of my first heroes had a female bodyguard was an important early example : I grew up believing that women could be barely as chic and brave as men, and longed to have, if not an actual girlfriend, a Sally of my own by my side. I loved these stories because they were about a child like me, a child who solved mysteries with logic and coarse sense, frequently exposing the hypocrisy of foolishly dismissive adults. I loved the sense of order and poise restored to the world at the end of each report — the genuine resoluteness at the center of all good crime fabrication. And I loved them because I was effective at them, because I was good at picking up on what was faulty about the break mirror, at spotting the lie of the swindling high school dropout. And nowadays I ‘m grow up .

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Rose Sobol
As things turned out, I became a forensic diagnostician and a writer. It took me a while to realize Sobol ‘s influence on me. But one night, in the middle of the Everglades, waiting for park rangers at the setting of a shotgun kill, I last saw the chase that led from Encyclopedia to that moment, a million years and a million miles aside. I moved on from Encyclopedia Brown to Sherlock Holmes, and then on to the village library, where I spent hours lost in books about fingerprints, about techniques of counterfeiting. As a aesculapian examiner, I ‘m adept in the evaluation of gunfire and knife wounds, but common sense and logic are identical much the foundation of my work — the hunt for the incorrect detail, the nourish incredulity about witness statements.

My cases now are complex and brutal, and they occur in a real world far from Idaville, far from the Browns ‘ dinner mesa. And I realize that I long for the simplicity of that world, with its net, definitive answers, and its quick return to happy normality : the idealize world of childhood. Jonathan Hayes ‘ most holocene book is A hard Death .