This frothy mystery can be oddly discursive and absent-minded (a bit like her aging protagonists), but I’m including it because of its preoccupation with books. There aren’t an abundance of codes and ciphers to be had with Christie, but there are a few, among them the final novel of the author’s life. Add to that a knockout twist ending that blew my nine-year-old mind, an experience not to be replicated until I discovered Agatha Christie years later…. Raskin’s genius wasn’t just her inclusion of the reader as contestant in Sam Westing’s mad game, but also in a larger thematic inclusiveness throughout her socially progressive novel. The game of the title pits the late paper baron Sam Westing’s heirs against each other by dividing them into teams and dispensing each with a partial set of clues: “It’s not what you have, it’s what you don’t have that counts.” Through the book’s shifting points of view, the reader is left to gather evidence from each perspective-both clues on paper and those hidden within the sprawling cast of characters.
We’re still in the Encyclopedia Brown demographic here, but trust me when I say that Raskin’s Newberry Award–winning classic holds up under adult re-readings. Where else does one have ciphered adventures but among books? You’ll notice that many of these titles concern books and libraries. This list is designed to recreate that Encyclopedic thrill, to put the reader behind the gasoline can to disentangle codes, clues, and riddles.
#Keepers of the rose puzzle crack#
That youthful itch to crack the case doesn’t subside just because one is grown up one just has to seek out age-appropriate Leroy Browns, adult amateur detectives trying to make sense of a cryptic world, and, in the process, bringing us along for the ride. If only being a detective in real life were so quaint. The solutions typically hinged on some accessible bit of trivia, like the fact that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist, that polar bears and penguins live on opposite poles, or that electric clocks do not tick. You might even say that the shocking twist of each story is that we were Encyclopedia Brown the whole time. What had me and others enthralled, of course, was that Sobol embedded clues in his stories for his young readers to gather and thereby solve the case.
#Keepers of the rose puzzle plus#
My attachment to this series had little to do with Leroy Brown the character, or even his trusty sidekick Sally Kimball-although children who run their own detective agency for “25 cents per day plus expenses” are charming to be sure.
Sobol’s boy detective, Encyclopedia Brown. Like many mystery-obsessed children, my first experience with child sleuths wasn’t Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, or the Hardy Boys, but with Donald J.