Identify yet another children's book.

September 22, 2010 1:33 PM

Children's book filter: Trying to remember the title/author of a book of mystery short stories I read as a kid.

The book is probably either late 1960s or early/mid 1970s. The two main characters are a librarian, who may have been named Sue, and a police detective. In each short story the librarian quickly figures out the answer based on some discrepancy she notices (something like Encyclopedia Brown). For example, in one story she realizes that the clothes in the hotel room don't belong to the woman found murdered there, because the victim has bright red hair and all the clothes are in colors that don't go with red hair. Another story has to do with a Czech (?) word meaning "restaurant" that the person who turns out to be the criminal cannot recognize even though he supposedly speaks Czech. I'm pretty sure that you had to turn to a different part of the book to get the solution to the mystery.

posted by JanetLand to Media & Arts (12 answers total)

Probably not exactly your book, but a similar book that I remember reading around the same time was called "One Minute Mysteries". They were each a page or two long and the solution was always a little detail that is easy to overlook but would make the perp's story completely impossible.

I tried looking on Amazon and there are lots of similar books including "Two Minute Mysteries", "One Minute Mysteries You Solve with Science", "Five Minute Mysteries", etc. If you can't find your exact match, you might enjoy the concept of these mysteries.
posted by CathyG at 1:55 PM on September 22, 2010

This is also not exactly what you're looking for, as far as I can tell, but I really liked the You Be the Jury series as a kid. They may be overly simplistic for an adult reader, however.

I wish someone would write similar books for grown-up mystery fans!
posted by easy, lucky, free at 2:29 PM on September 22, 2010

Oh, I remember these books! But not the name, unfortunately. I'm still looking, but maybe someone else can use this clue: the language was Russian and the word was PECTOPAH, which uses letters that look the same but sound different in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. The clever librarian caught some guy who claimed he'd been to Russia but didn't know the word for "restaurant" which is something every traveller needs to know.
posted by Quietgal at 3:23 PM on September 22, 2010

Quietgal, here are two references to PECTOPAH and Encyclopedia Brown:

I think it was Encyclopedia Brown who taught us all that "PECTOPAH" is pronounced "restaurant", no? (source)

My favorite Encyclopedia Brown tale was when a know-it-all gets busted by guessing that the pronunciation of the Russian PECTOPAH is "peck-TOE-pa" when it's really "restoran," as in restaurant. (source)

Encyclopedia Brown's sidekick is Sally Kimball.
posted by MonkeyToes at 3:35 PM on September 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

MonkeyToes, I'm not surprised Encyclopedia Brown had a similar schtick - children's detective stories are pretty repetitive. But I definitely remember the clever librarian sleuth (named Sarah, maybe? although I don't remember her police detective pal), and the PECTOPAH and redhead stories are the ones that stuck in my memory too. Especially since I thought the clothing colors were a really weak piece of evidence: as a fashion-challenged geeky little girl, I thought that redheads might like red and hot pink clothes, and color preferences were too subjective to base anything on. Yet Sarah(?) says definitively that a redhead would have a suitcase full of blue or green clothes, so this must be somebody else's luggage. still no luck with the Googling
posted by Quietgal at 3:52 PM on September 22, 2010

So is it Enc. Brown? I'm confused by the comments.
posted by iconomy at 9:01 PM on September 22, 2010

Response by poster: The book I am trying to remember is most definitely not Encyclopedia Brown. It featured grownups, not children, and the two incidents I related absolutely happened in the book I'm trying to remember, wherever they may have happened in some other book as well.

I did look to see if perhaps Donald Sobol had written both books, which would have made sense, but no luck.
posted by JanetLand at 3:34 AM on September 23, 2010

Response by poster: I started guessing at titles, because I finally decided that "mysteries" was part of the title, and I found it. This is definitely it -- I recognize the cover. Unfortunately I can't find much of a description of it anywhere, so I'll probably have to buy a copy to find out that darned librarian's name.
posted by JanetLand at 6:19 AM on September 23, 2010

"A book featuring a female detective with the same initials as Sherlock Holmes is Mini-Mysteries, by Julia Remine Piggin, but I couldn't find such a case in that book or any sequels to it. All of these came out in paperback from Scholastic in the early 1970s. The mysteries were about a page each with the solution printed upside-down at the bottom of the page. "
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:39 PM on September 23, 2010

Oh!

C18080. -- B6082. Piggin, Julia Remine. Mini-Mysteries. New York: Scholastic Book Services, [September 1973]. 159 p. (TK 2382)

Fifty-nine mini-mysteries to solve, with Sara Hull, detective; also known as Ms. Sherlock Holmes. One of the mysteries is entitled "Sherlock Holmes Reincarnated?"
posted by MonkeyToes at 12:40 PM on September 23, 2010

...and Library Thing identifies your mystery man as Detective Bill Tawson.
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:40 PM on September 23, 2010

Yay! This was driving me nuts - I Googled stuff like "Sarah Holmes" and "Two-Minute Mysteries", which were so close and yet so far. Huh, when I was a kid I got the Hull/Holmes wordplay, but Tawson/Watson escaped me. *groan*
posted by Quietgal at 7:49 PM on September 23, 2010