No Case Too Small
If children were influenced by every book they read, I would have grown up to be a detective. Actually, I might not have waited - I would have been a kid sleuth.
In the 70s and 80s, there were lots of children’s books featuring kids solving mysteries.I read many, many of them. The Five Find-Outers and Dog, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven (all three series by Enid Blyton), the Three Investigators, Nancy Drew and, of course, the Hardy Boys.The Five Find-Outers and Dog, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, (all by Enid Blyton) the Three Investigators, Nancy Drew and, of course, the Hardy Boys. That last series was one of my favourites.
I remember the row of blue hardcovers in the St Stephen's school library. I did my best to read them all, even making a list of all the titles and checking each one off as I finished it. I never got through them all. I even don’t remember any particular book, although I remember thinking at the time that Chet and Biff were very odd names.
Meanwhile the Enid Blyton mysteries featuring kid detectives often involved gangs of children romping around the English countryside, pausing occasionally for tea with jam and scones or whatever, and then (by a combination of clever deduction and sheer coincidence) foiling the plans of smugglers. Even now I have the impression the bad guys were almost always smugglers. Or forgers!
Not that any of that had anything to do with my life. None of it was remotely relatable: I didn’t live in the countryside, there weren’t any caves or cliffs near me, and I never had anything with jam on it for tea. I also didn’t go away to live with a distant aunt or uncle for the holidays, and I certainly didn’t have a band of fun-loving chums plus one dog to solve crimes with.
Being a precocious reader I wanted to read everything, and read anything I could get my hands on, even if I didn’t quite understand. What was available me was outre and fantastic, compared to my day-to-day life. Small wonder that I eventually developed a love for speculative fiction: even so-called “normal” books might as well have been set in outer space.
(For a while though, I assumed that every stranger around me was a secret smuggler. I wasn’t sure what a smuggler was. They hid things in strange places, and came back to get them later in boats. But they were bad. I wasn’t fond of strangers, and of smugglers even less.)
The kid detective that I loved the most was Encyclopedia Brown - Leroy Brown to his parents, but everyone else in Idaville called him Encyclopedia. He helped his father, the police chief, solve crimes (I think the Hardy Boys’ dad was a detective or policeman, too), and had his own detective agency that he ran out of the garage, with a sign that proclaimed “No Case Too Small - 25c a day plus expenses”. Unlike the others, each Encyclopedia Brown book consisted of a few short stories, during which he would solve a crime, and then the reader was asked how he did it. The answers were in the back, and I was often quite thrilled when I figured it out correctly.
Little me was absolutely rapt.
Adult me is actually contemplating following up, by reading two books about those children (or children like them) all grown up: Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails and Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids. There are probably others that I haven’t come across.
What’s holding me back is a combination of nostalgia and apprehension. I didn’t grow up to be a detective, and I wasn’t a detective as a child (although I’m sure I was unnecessarily inquisitive, but that’s true of all children). Who knows what became of those kids. I’m fairly sure that the dog hasn’t survived. Did they? Do they sit around, remembering old times, thinking of how many smugglers they put away?
Or did they leave it all behind, like so many other parts of childhood?
PS There’s one more book that might sort of fall into that category: Dan Hank’s Swashbucklers, but I think that’s more “what happens when the Stranger Things kids grow up”. Actually, now that I come to think of it, Meddling Kids is more like “what happened to Mystery, Inc.”, at least according to the blurb.