Ed Brubaker is one of my household gods now.

[proteus_lives]

Greetings True Believers!

Well, I picked up Criminal: The Last of the Innocent. (Thanks for the tip Scans Daily!) and I discovered something wonderful in the back.

Mr. Brubaker remembers and likes The Great Brain and Encyclopedia Brown.

All of a sudden I'm back in my childhood. I fucking devoured those books.

He wrote a great article about them. Enjoy!



"Encyclopedia Brown and the Great Brain"
"Vs."





Yes, those books ruled. If you have any young ones, find them and share.

Comments

[auggie18]

I'm glad he pointed out the thing that always bothered me about Encyclopedia Brown, namely, the frequently bullshit solutions. I remember Sally solving one by using an obscure etiquette rule about table positions and thinking: What if they're innocent people who just don't read Miss Manners as much as you do?

But they were still a lot of fun and I loved the fact that Sally was the brawn of the relationship. She was strong and not afraid to prove it, something I loved even as a little kid. (She and Irene from my mom's old Danny Dunn books were the two adventurers who ruled my childhood, though Irene was more on the brainy side of things.)

[laddical]

I don't want to be responsible for killing other people's time so I won't provide a link, but over at TVtropes, that phenomenon used to be called "Bugs Meany's Gonna Walk".

[eyz]

Completely unrelated, but I love your "Guy hugging Kyle"-icon very much XD

[glimmung]

I had totally forgotten about the Great Brain. Freaking awesome.

Encyclopedia Brown though... God I thought those were terrible, I guess something about the atmosphere resonated with Brubaker.

[lorriek]

I loved the Great Brain books! Just recently I was thinking that I should reread them (so what if I'm almost 35). I think the books started my love affair with antiheroes. Every kid should read that fun series.

Encyclopedia Brown I didn't really get into, although I know I must of read a few of them.

[zenbro]

Encyclopedia Brown was great for precocious ten-year-olds (hi!) who could figure out why the money was hidden inside the penguins in the polar bear exhibit.

[golden_orange]

Encyclopedia Brown's definitely a little hokey when you're old enough to realize that, yeah, it's actually NOT inconceivable that someone might put something in their left pocket with their right hand for non-nefarious crime-related reasons, but they're a bit more fun if you're a kid who's perceptiveness hasn't gotten that far yet.

[arilou_skiff]

When I grew up (which wasn't the 60's) there were a ton of child detectives, most famous probably Astrind Lindgren's but there were many, many others...

Danny Dunn

[capt_satellite]

I dug Encyclopedia Brown, but I had a passion for the Danny Dunn books by the unlikely pair of Raymond Abrashkin (a Greenwich Village screenwriter) and Jay Williams (a borst-belt comedian), available through our library and the beloved Scholastic Book Club....children's science fiction books that contained a surprising amount of science fact. Some were simple updates of old sci-fi lit saws ("Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint") but most some were pretty damn prescient...."Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space", published in 1967, dealt with something very much like the work SETI was starting, "Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy" was a parable dealing with the conundrum of science's responsibility for the socio-political effects of new technologies, and our own government to use invasive technologies on its own citizens. Weather control, the moralities of artificial intelligence, cryptography, paleontology, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, SOTA oceanography, all grounded in the life of real people.

"Although the series is science-fiction, its stories are firmly based on scientific fact. For instance, the Lamont Geological Laboratories furnished information for The Ocean Floor and I.B.M. contributed greatly to The Homework Machine. For The Heat Ray, I was shown one of the first lasers in use. An attamp has always been made to keep the science in the stories ahead of actual scientific developments. many of the inventions suggested in The Automatic House, then purely hypothetical--such as the video-telephone, the rotating house, and the door responding to voice control--actually appeared in public use within a year after the book was published. --Jay Williams "

They were part of the mosaic that fed my own voracious appetites for more than the horizons of the little 6,000 person Western Washington Logging town I lived in could offer. I owe those books a lot.